Daily Medieval

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

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...

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...