Daily Medieval

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...

In the middle of the 14th century, the centers of medical knowledge were the universities at Bologna, Montpellier, and Paris. One of the pro...

Successful surgery benefits from knowledge of the body's interior, and the study of anatomy was not always easy to come by. Dissecting ...

The Middle Ages saw illness as an imbalance in the humors of the body. Sometimes that could be treated by changing the diet. In the case of...

Trying to understand biology had many false starts. You probably have some idea of "humors" and the adjectives cold, hot, wet, and...

The modern Italian word for a notebook is taccuino . It comes from the medieval (and later) popularity of the Tacuinum Sanitatis . That name...

Our teeth would no doubt be better off if this had never been discovered, but Pandora's box was opened long ago. Different species of su...

Galen was one of the primary sources of medical expertise in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, often to the neglect of other authors. The...

The man who would become known to Western Europe as Saint Blaise was Bishop Vlasi of Sebastea in Armenia. His life was written about 400 yea...

The oldest apothecary in Europe was founded in Dubrovnik, in southern Dalmatia in Croatia. At the time, it was called Ragusa; to be fair, i...

The Bubonic Plague , also called the "Black Death," first hit the European Middle Ages primarily in 1348-1351, but that wasn't...