When the first waves of the Black Death struck Europe in the fourteenth century, the last thing likely to be on anyone’s mind was staying cheerful; yet overwhelmingly, this is the advice that contemporary physicians gave. Medieval plague treatises explained that dwelling excessively on the horrors of the plague and thoughts of death could actually…
Tag: medieval medicine
Reading the Physician: Experiments with Patient Authority in Medieval Medical Literature
Emily Price // The Régime du corps is a medical manuscript written in the 13th century by Aldobrandino da Siena, a compendium of medical knowledge that uses historiated initials and chapters on health and diet to catalogue common medical practices and methods for caring for one’s own body. Most surviving copies of the manuscript are…