Medicine and society in medieval Europe, 500-1500

Bibliographic Data

ID23183333
AuthorsKatharine Park (Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, corresponding author)
Year1992
Pages59-90
Publication date1992-02-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueMedicine in Society (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9780511599682.003
OpenAlexW1023799237
ISBN9780511599682
LanguageEN
Citations received16

The hallmarks of medieval medical care were its variety and its intensity. Our own society boasts a relatively small (although growing) range of both medical institutions and publicly recognized medical practitioners, narrowly defined, similarly trained, and socially homogeneous. Medieval society, on the other hand, like many present-day traditional societies, looked to a much broader set of healers and strategies to care for its precarious health. In part this situation reflected much higher levels of illness than we are used to – levels that sprang from extensive poverty and unhealthy living conditions as much or more than the limits of medieval therapeutics. In part it reflected the variety of medieval society itself. A millenium separated the Europeans of 1500 from their counterparts in 500, and that millenium encompassed changes arguably far more radical than those of the five centuries that separate us from them. Furthermore, Europe was much more diverse then than now, when advances in transportation and communication and other social shifts have acted to homogenize institutions and to break down cultural and linguistic barriers between nations, between city and countryside, between rich and poor.

Ancient history · Development economics · Economic growth · Economic history · Economics · Health care · Homogeneous · Medical care · Middle Ages · Political science · Poverty · Social science · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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