The Rationale Behind Dark Age Medicine

Tuesday - November 7 2023, 04:11 UTC - 1 year ago

Recent research pushes against the depiction of the Middle Ages as ignorant and superstitious by providing evidence of the consistency and rationality of Dark Age medical practices. This period saw the emergence of a medical philosophy that championed manipulating the physical world for religious duty. During this time, religious institutions and manuscripts provided a framework for research and religious orthodoxy was integrated with medical knowledge. The rise of vulture medicines was based on a long tradition of remedies derived from plants, animals, and minerals, as detailed in ancient texts which are still referenced today.

Nothing calls to mind nonsensical treatments and bizarre religious healing rituals as easily as the notion of Dark Age medicine. "The Saturday Night Live" sketch Medieval Barber Theodoric of York says it all with its portrayal of a quack doctor who insists on extracting pints of his patients’ blood in a dirty little shop.

Though the skit relies on dubious stereotypes, it’s true that many cures from the Middle Ages sound utterly ridiculous – consider a list written around 800 C.E. of remedies derived from a decapitated vulture. Mixing its brain with oil and inserting that into the nose was thought to cure head pain, and wrapping its heart in wolf skin served as an amulet against demonic possession.

"Dark Age medicine" is a useful narrative when it comes to ingrained beliefs about medical progress. It is a period that stands as the abyss from which more enlightened thinkers freed themselves. But recent research pushes back against the depiction of the early Middle Ages as ignorant and superstitious, arguing that there is a consistency and rationality to healing practices at that time.

As a historian of the early Middle Ages, roughly 400 to 1000 C.E., I make sense of how the societies that produced vulture medicine envisioned it as one component of a much broader array of legitimate therapies. In order to recognize "progress" in Dark Age medicine, it is essential to see the broader patterns that led a medieval scribe to copy out a set of recipes using vulture organs.

The major innovation of the age was the articulation of a medical philosophy that validated manipulating the physical world because it was a religious duty to rationally guard the body’s health.

Reason and religion .

The names of classical medical innovators like Hippocrates and Galen were well known in the early Middle Ages, but few of their texts were in circulation prior to the 13th century. Most intellectual activities in northern Europe were taking place within monasteries, where the majority of surviving medical writings from that time were written, read, discussed and likely put into practice. Scholars have assumed that religious superstition overwhelmed scientific impulse and the church dictated what constituted legitimate healing – namely, prayer, anointing with holy oil, miracles of the saints and penance for sin.

However, "human medicine" – a term affirming human agency in discovering remedies from nature – emerged in the Dark Ages. It appears again and again in a text monks at the monastery of Lorsch, Germany, wrote around the year 800 to defend ancient Greek medical learning. It insists that Hippocratic medicine was mandated by God and that doctors act as divine agents in promoting health. I argue in my recent book, "Embodying the Soul: Medicine and Religion in Carolingian Europe," that a major innovation of that time was the creative synthesis of Christian orthodoxy with a growing belief in the importance of preventing disease.

Establishing an intellectual framework for medical study was an accomplishment of early medieval scholars. Doctors faced the risk of being lumped together with those who dealt in sorcery and pagan folkloric cures. A Carolingian catalog of plants from the early ninth century explains the therapeutic effects of various herbs while emphasizing their naturalistic qualities, an effort to separate craft healing from those deemed too magical.

Vulture medicine .

Unfortunately, there isn't much consensus among classicists and medical historians when it comes to disentangling superstition from scientific knowledge in vulture medicine. Specific practices involving vultures are difficult to sort out from classical European sources, which makes it challenging to assign their remedies to their proper cultural tradition.

But textual sources frequently entwine ancient Greek and Roman medical techniques with increasingly sophisticated knowledge of human health in the Middle Ages. An eighth-century set of extracts from the writings of Hippocrates, for example, includes recipes for medicinal wine, therapeutic baths, fevers caused by the supernatural and the proper disposal of waste.

Some of the medicines from this era draw upon a long tradition of treatments in herbals, manuals of medicinal plants and their therapeutic properties. Ancient authors like Hippocrates, Theophrastus and Dioscorides wrote about the curative properties of plants, animals and minerals, resulting in authoritative works on naturalism that would become canonical in Europe and ultimately form much of what we know today as botany and pharmacology.

These texts provide a foundation for our modern scientific understanding of health, but they also help explain why so many strange medical treatments like vulture medicines emerged in the Middle Ages.