Daily Medieval

William of Malmesbury tells us that William the Conqueror fell from his horse in summer of 1087 while fighting on the continent and suffer...

We started a conversation yesterday on the use of urine by medieval Western European physicians to determine health. I thought today we...

Last post mentioned that a medieval illustrator indicated a physician by showing him holding a flask. There was a very specific substance i...

We've been talking about blood as food , and some recipes using blood in cooking, but now let's talk about health-related blood. Bl...

An Andalusian Arab named Ibn Juljul wrote  Ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’ w’al-hukamā’ ("Generations of Physicians and Wise Men") in the late ...

I've talked before about John of Gaddesden , a late-13th-century doctor who wrote a compendium of medical knowledge. A little before him...

We've been looking at the Medieval theories of women's reproductive systems and conception , and now it's time to see how they ...

Before modern medicine and studies of biology, theories of how babies developed in utero  were "best guesses" based on what was ob...

A cataract is a medical condition where the lens of the eye becomes increasingly cloudy, leading to blindness. You would think that the Midd...

Besides being attractive and easily carved into jewelry, amber was considered special in many ways. Its special attributes were first descr...

John Arderne (1307 - 1392), of whom I first wrote many years ago , has been called the father of English surgery. He earned this by producin...

John of Arderne (1307 - 1392) was an innovative English surgeon who devised a number of cures and procedures and is considered the first Eng...

Roger Frugard (pre-1140 - c.1195) was also known as Rogerius, and sometimes called Roger of Salerno because he taught and worked at the hosp...

Yesterday's post took a turn toward a particular surgical procedure , so I thought we'd talk a little more about that topic. What pr...

Folk in Classical and Medieval times developed many methods for avoiding getting pregnant , but sometimes the inevitable happened. The Bible...

Yesterday we talked about medieval parents having large families. Today we're going to talk about preventing large families. Although Ca...

Let's talk about hair in the Middle Ages; not hairstyles, but hair itself. Hairstyles were important, of course, because there was cultu...

John of Salisbury liked the idea of academic skepticism, which ultimately came from Plato's Academy. Let me explain. The head of Plato...

It was Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1840s in Vienna who noticed a link between illness (and death) and unsanitary conditions, specifically a link...

Speaking of surgery recently, we need to take a look at Theodoric Borgognoni, who pioneered some practices that were ahead of their time. B...