Medicine in mediæval Christian history is simply the history of miracles of healing wrought by saints or by their relics. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, for example, is full of saintly cures and marvels of healing. The study of medical science under such circumstances could have had but little encouragement. Doctors were but of secondary importance where holy relics and saintly personages were everywhere present to cure.

In the Catholic Church there are special saints who are invoked for almost every sort of disease.

Pettigrew[803] gives the above list, but probably it might be considerably extended.

Charms and Astrology.

A curious little MS. volume was discovered amongst the MSS. at Loseley, which contained a Latin grammar, a Treatise on Astrology, various medical recipes and precautions, with forms for making wills. It had probably been a monk’s manual. The writing was the character of the fifteenth century. Some of the medical recipes and astrological precautions are said to be taken from “Master Galien (Galen), leche,” thus:—“For all manner of fevers. Take iii drops of a woman’s mylke yt norseth a knave childe, and do it in a hennes egge that ys sedentere (or sitting), and let hym suppe it up when the evyl takes hym.—For hym—that may not slepe. Take and wryte yese wordes into leves of lether: Ismael! Ismael! adjuro te per Angelum Michaelum ut soporetur homo iste; and lay this under his bed, so yt he wot not yerof, and use it all-way lytell, and lytell, as he have nede yerto.” Under the head,—“Here begyneth ye waxingge of ye mone, and declareth in dyvers tymes to let blode, whiche be gode. In the furste begynynge of the mone it is profetable to yche man to be letten blode; ye ix of the mone, neyther be (by) nyght ne by day, it is not good.”[804]

One Simon Trippe, a physician, writing to a patient to excuse himself for not being able to visit him, says: “As for my comming to you upon Wensday next, verely my promise be past to an old pacient of mine, a very good gentlewoman, one Mrs. Clerk, wch now lieth in great extremity. I cannot possibly be with you till Thursday. On Fryday and Saterday the signe wilbe in the heart; on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, in the stomake; during wch tyme it wilbe no good dealing with your ordinary physicke untill Wensday come sevenight at the nearest, and from that time forwards for 15 or 16 days passing good.”[805]

This is very similar to what we find in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, where (A.D. 686) “a holy Bishop having been asked to bless a sick maiden, asked ‘when she had been bled?’ and being told that it was on the fourth day of the moon, said: ‘You did very indiscreetly and unskilfully to bleed her on the fourth day of the moon; for I remember that Archbishop Theodore, of blessed memory, said that bleeding at that time was very dangerous, when the light of the moon and the tide of the ocean is increasing; and what can I do to the girl if she is like to die?’”[806]

Holinshed says[807] that a lewd fellow, in the sixth year of Richard the Second, “took upon him to be skilful in physick and astronomy,” predicted that the rise of a “pestilent planet” would cause much sickness and death amongst the people; but as the pestilence did not appear, the fellow was punished severely. Stow records[808] that one Roger Bolingbroke, in the second year of Henry the Sixth (1423), was accused of necromancy and endeavouring by diabolical arts to consume the king’s person. He was seized with all his instruments of magic and set upon a scaffold in St. Paul’s Churchyard, where he abjured his diabolical arts in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and many other prelates. The punishment for witchcraft was hanging or burning alive.

Strutt says[809] that it was extremely dangerous in those days to pretend to any supernatural knowledge; as every one believed in the influence of malignant spirits, and that they were obedient to the call of the necromancers. “No contagion could happen among the cattle of a farmer, but the devil was the cause, and some conjurer was sought out; so that if any wretched vagabonds of fortune-tellers could be found, they were instantly accused of this horrid crime, and perhaps burnt alive.”[810]