January 2011 Meeting

Medieval Medecine and Surgery

One of the most entertaining meetings put on by Bidford History Society took place when Helen Lee and Paul Harding from the Discover History Group came to expose the painful and gory experience of Mediaeval Medicine and Surgery as practiced in this country in the later fifteenth century.

Armed with a hideous selection of knives, saws, pincers and other blood-letting devices backed by a range of primitive medicines, warnings and horror stories, Paul Harding held his eighty-strong audience in a state of attentive anxiety from start to finish.

Having established the quality of his patients by the quality of their clothes, he went on to explain that in the 15^thcentury, sick people first went to church to pray for forgiveness of their sins, and if that didn’t work, went to a local “wise woman”, an apothecary or a doctor for a cure.

In his estimation, the best bet was the apothecary, who would prescribe medicines and sometimes effect a cure, rather than a physician, who could diagnose an illness but was not licensed to treat it, or a barber/surgeon, who was trained in physiology and handy with the knife, the hammer and chisel, and the trepan, but short on pain relief.

To help prospective patients, Paul advised the Society that the cheapest option was the wise woman, but that some of her cures (as he demonstrated) were rather repulsive. This was folk medicine, using “zodiacal treatments” and similar approaches.  For a post-op consultation she was unreliable, having possibly gone to the ducking stool meanwhile, since her profession touched on witchcraft.

Altogether, the infusions and herbal remedies practiced by the apothecary were the most likely to produce a positive outcome, but would of course be more costly than the woman in the market place.

The local historians learned that 15^thcentury patients were treated sitting, and not on operating tables. Demonstrations given included dental surgery, amputations and cauterisation, bone wrenching and trepanning, and the lecture concluded with a detailed commentary on a typical surgical operation.

Paul Harding’s talk kept his audience on the edge of their seats and generated the most lively question and discussion session for many months, touching, among other relevant topics, on military and trauma surgery, and advances in safe and pain-free anaesthesia.