Why Medieval Medicine Will Blow Your Mind
Let's Talk Truth About Traditional European Medicine
What do we get wrong about medieval medicine?
Pretty much everything.
I say this gently. I’ve been researching the subject for twenty-five years, and it took me almost that long to realize that I was getting it wrong, too.
I mean horribly wrong.
When I say “medieval medicine,” most people instantly think of leeches. Next up is gory amputations and witchy remedies with frog spleen. And of course, you’ve heard of “humors” and how everyone had a “type.” Adding to the circus, scholars spend a lot of time discussing the nascent “science” of it all.
But nobody talks about what it really was.
It Started in Salerno
I only began to see the truth because I had a terrible case of writer’s block.
In the medieval period, Salerno, Italy had a famous medical school. It was the first medical school in Europe, as we understand university in the modern sense.
What completely blows my mind is that this school was open to women, and that a brilliant female physician named Trotula (her real name was Trota) taught there and even wrote a famous text.
I discovered this in college and became so obsessed with Trota that I read everything I could get my hands on. I decided to write about her and Salerno.
Every time I started to write, I would get all swept up and pound away at the keyboard, yet I would always come to some weird halt about thirty pages in.
I’d let the pages sit for a while (with the idea that I needed to “consider what to do next”) and then, maybe a few weeks or months later, I’d re-read those pages and be utterly thunderstruck by how awful they were.
Every time, I would feel this agony, like I so badly want to get this novel into the world why can’t I do this??
I’d comfort myself by saying that whatever story I was going to tell has been waiting for 900 years, so maybe it could wait a few more.
But Salerno always crept back into my head. I’d wake up one morning and be like: Oh my god SALERNO, it’s like you’re RIGHT THERE. And I’d haul out my (literally) six moving boxes full of print-outs and three boxes of niche academic books, and I’d start reading.
I read wildly and I read everything. Even the weirdest little paragraphs about obscure medieval figures excited the hell out of me.
I’d generate hundreds of pages of notes. I’d work up a new idea for a story, and I’d start writing, and…the whole thing would happen again.
Men Are Hot
Then I got ever-so-conveniently injured.
Actually, I’d had the injury for a while—a neck injury—and I got deeply annoyed by the whole thing. Much like Salerno, it would not go away.
Medical science had utterly failed me, and by then I had already tried a variety of solutions—my physician, massage, acupuncture, cupping, reiki, six rounds of physical therapy, and an orthopedic surgeon.
In a quest to figure out what else I could do, I began reading about all forms of alternative therapies. And I made, what was for me, an abrupt discovery.
For many years, I’d been reading Trota’s book on medicine, and in the opening paragraph she writes: “Men are hot and women are cold.”
And for years I’d skip over that, a little embarrassed for her, and get into the other stuff—all these treatments using plant medicine, the explanations about how to deal with weird periods and childbirth.
One of the books I was reading about Traditional Chinese Medicine opens with an explanation that one of the basic principles of TCM is that of yin and yang, which is sometimes called masculine and feminine, and which is sometimes called hot and cold.
It brushed through my mind that this was kind of like the Trota thing.
I dismissed it, thinking I didn’t want to make Trota’s writing all new-agey. Thou shalt not fall into that trap, historical novelist, ye know this well.
Only I couldn’t ignore it.
A few days later, I had every book on TCM I could find on one side of my desk, every medieval medical text on the other, and I began a systematic comparison of parts.
And it shocked me that the two systems were profoundly similar.
Orientalism
I thought: Wow, why is it that when I read about this stuff in TCM, it sounds very mystical and cool? I mean, I even got acupuncture. But when I read medieval medicine, it’s not mystical or cool. For example, I would not get a leech.
This attitude—accepting “out there” ideas from a foreign culture but not from your own—is basically orientalism. We use it when we want to deny that we have certain qualities. We’re not hypersexual—they are. We’re not violent and warlike—they are. We’re not ridiculously mystical—they are.
I realized that, for years, I’d been looking at medieval medicine as weirdly quaint and mysteriously heathen and inexplicably leechy, but I’d never once accepted it as a valid system.
If it’s Chinese, it’s valid. If it’s Western European, I’m embarrassed.
Greek Medicine
Salernitan medicine was based on the writings of Hippocrates, Galen, and an extraordinary number of Arab and Jewish physicians. It was basically a mish-mash of Greek, Roman, Arab, and Jewish medicine. And all of these parts agreed on some basic things:
Our bodies are animated by spiritus—what the Chinese call qi.
There are two forces working in the body, hot and cold, or masculine and feminine—what the Chinese call yin and yang.
We inhale spiritus from the air. We take it in through our food. And we transform it in our bodies into a subtle energy.
This energy can get blocked or can overflow at certain points. Solving this requires medical expertise.
Good health doesn’t just come from treating symptoms. It is a result of homeostasis, restoring the body’s overall balance.
The body, the mind, and the spirit are all interconnected.
The body is interconnected to the greater cosmos.
Good health also comes from aligning the body to the greater world—the seasons, the environment, and the time of one’s life.
Magistra
For me, understanding this meant honoring the fact that for 2000-plus years, Europeans believed that medicine was based on energies and invisible spirit-substance, as well as material fact.
It meant honoring that plants can heal through energy substances (and that they can even tell you what they can heal).
It meant understanding that the power of suggestion is capable of healing in and of itself, and that is straight-up because there is something in each of us that can heal itself.
Once I started thinking of this medicine as a valid system, I took one look at my characters and was like: “Oh my god, that’s why you sucked. I didn’t get that you thought it was a valid system. I thought you were all champions of medical science when actually you had a completely different view of the entire cosmos.”
In this Substack, I’ll be looking at some of the really exciting details of medieval medicine, and sharing my thoughts on Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda as well.
I just put the finishing touches on my novel. It’s called Magistra, and I’m really excited to share it with you. Medieval medicine is going to blow your mind!