When she died in 1316, Tevena, a merchant woman of Lyon, possessed a range of precious stones, including a sapphire believed to cure swellings. Tevena was not a trained physician or surgeon, but she owned healing objects for addressing her own medical issues and those of her family members. There was a great richness and diversity of medicine in medieval Europe. From the elite practice of university-educated doctors, to care within monasteries and households, medieval people benefited from a wide range of ideas, strategies and treatments aimed at preserving health and combating illness. Some of these approaches, such as magico-religious healing charms that involved ‘drinking’ words written on parchment and dissolved in water, may appear bizarre or futile today. Yet they demonstrate the careful attention that medieval women and men paid to their health, and their resilience in the face of disease, especially after the arrival of plague in Europe in the mid-14th century.
BODY & HEALTH
Medieval medicine was rooted in a set of theoretical concepts derived from the ancient world, above all from the writings of Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460–c. 370 BCE) and Galen of Pergamon (129–c.216 CE). These ideas taught that health depended on the balance of four fluids or humours within the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Illness occurred when one of these humours predominated or was lacking. Health was also affected by a set of six external or variable factors known as the non-naturals: the air, food and drink, exercise/rest, sleep/wakefulness, retention/purgation and emotional states. In his Tacuinum sanitatis (Tables of health), composed in Arabic in the mid-11th century and subsequently translated into Latin, the physician Ibn Butlān explained how the non-naturals operated and needed to be managed, situating the human body in the broader context of the natural world. He detailed how, like the humours, the non-naturals should be kept in equilibrium. For example, emotions should be regulated “by moderating joy, anger, fear and distress”. Late medieval illustrated manuscripts of the Tacuinum vividly depict medicinal plants and foodstuffs alongside the winds, the seasons and other environmental factors that impacted on health.
