This modern conception of medicine relies on defined roles and distinctions, boundaries if you will, between all kinds of medical practitioner that society can access; physicians, pharmacists, nurses, midwives, psychiatrists, and surgeons to name but a few.
This idea, that one type of doctor should treat one type of problem, has existed in some form for at least years in Britain, and likely even longer than that. Although it did not become official policy until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII started to formalise these distinctions, as we will see throughout this paper, legislation or proclamation, and actual practice, were often divorced from one another.
To understand where the supposed divisions of the post-medieval period came from, this paper will first define the state of medical practice during the early post-medieval period, specifically from the reign of Henry VIII to the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century. It will then explore the medieval antecedents of those practices in an attempt to explain how the latter situation arose and will compare them to the development of medical professions elsewhere in Europe where the professional divisions evolved differently.
From the middle of the sixteenth century all three branches of medicine had legally defined rights and duties. Physicians advised and prescribed medications, apothecaries compounded and dispensed those remedies, and surgeons performed all physical intervention from bloodletting to amputation. This system was a legislative attempt to create a hierarchy of legitimate practice based on supposed levels of skill and knowledge. A good example of this tripartite thinking comes from the writings of William Bullein who stated that.
The apothecary must first serve God. He must foresee the end, be cleanly, and pity the poor. His place of dwelling and shop must be cleanly, to please the sense withal. His garden must be at hand with plenty of herbs, seeds and roots. He must read Dioscorides. He must have his mortars, stills, pots, filters, glasses, boxes, clean and sweet. He must have two places in his shop, one for most clean physick and the base place for chirurgic stuff.
However, throughout the early modern period there was always poor separation of the different classes of trained medical practitioner in England. The rest of this paper will examine the situation in the preceding centuries and will try and explain how it came to this tangled web of practice and legislation. The quantity and variety of medical practitioners in the medieval period was overwhelming; they were literally everywhere, from members of the mendicant orders, to the village blacksmith who would also pull teeth.
The same individual might be referred to as a surgeon, apothecary, grocer or by various other titles depending on who is writing and for what purpose. In addition, many practitioners also practiced non-medical trades, with medicine forming only a part of their income, a situation that continued into the eighteenth century.
The varied terminology for different medical practitioners are therefore unreliable indicators of the precise practice of an individual. The two most distinct groups within the medical practitioners of the medieval period were the physicians and the master surgeons. Both groups claimed higher levels of knowledge than other practitioners though only physicians had a university education.
The requirement of a medical degree to be considered a physician meant that there were very few physicians in England in the medieval period compared to the other medical practitioners.
Master Surgeons were not necessarily more skilled technically than the barber-surgeons, but distinguished themselves on the basis of prestige and wore similar long robes to physicians despite not being university educated.
Two of the main methods of bloodletting were leeching and venesection. The worms would suck off a quantity of blood before falling off. Venesection was the direct opening of a vein, generally on the inside of the arm, for the draining of a substantial quantity of blood. The tool used for venesection was the fleam, a narrow half-inch long blade, which penetrates the vein, and leaves a small wound. The blood ran into a bowl, which was used to measure the amount of blood taken.
Monks in various monasteries had regular bloodletting treatments — whether they were sick or not — as a means of keeping good health. They had to be excused from regular duties for several days while they recovered. Childbirth in the Middle Ages was considered so deadly that the Church told pregnant women to prepare their shrouds and confess their sins in case of death. Midwives were important to the Church due to their role in emergency baptisms and were regulated by Roman Catholic law.
The medieval version of the enema was known as the clyster, which is really an instrument for injecting fluids into the body through the anus. The clyster was a long metallic tube with a cupped end, into which the medicinal fluid was poured. The other end, a dull point, which was drilled with several small holes, was inserted into the anus.
Fluids were poured in and a plunger was used to inject the fluids into the colon area, using a pumping action. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the medieval clyster was replaced by the more common bulb syringe. In France, the treatment became quite fashionable.
King Louis XIV had over 2, enemas during his reign, sometimes holding court while the ceremony progressed. Photo by: CMA. Treatment of many diseases in the Middle Ages included prayers to patron saints for possible divine intervention. Also of note, this Medieval Doctors Kit also looks like it could double over as a set of torturers tools, so if you are looking for something in that direction, this set should also be right up your alley.
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review. View All Brands. No products in the cart. Medieval Doctors Kit Sheath What is a medieval doctor to do, with so many tools and so few places to put them?
The other method, called "venesection" used a fleam, a short, narrow blade used to cut the vein, and a small bowl to catch the blood. Battlefield surgeons relied on an image called "a wounded man" to assist them. This was an early form of the medical textbook, and it showed a diagram of a man with every conceivable type of battle injury.
In the diagram, the wound man has arrows, daggers, swords and spears stuck into him. The wound man showed the surgeon examples of the many types of wounds he would find, although it didn't actually tell the surgeon how to treat each type.
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