Healing the Sick in Medieval Times

Posted by Rachel Bellerby Jun 9, 2008

Medical practitioners were often mistrusted and people instead created their own medicines using the materials around them. Recipes for coughs and cold medicines, painkillers and potions to relieve stomach disorders were passed down through the generations and adapted as necessary.

The services of a doctor were out of the price range of ordinary people, but most communities had healers and midwives who would offer their skills to the local population. These people who usually be self-taught and would often take goods rather than money as payment for their services.

There was a fear of hospitals in the middle ages, spread through tales of people who had gone in to be cured and didn’t come out alive. It would seem that sometimes a person was safer to treat themselves at home, but this was due to issues of hygiene and cleanliness in hospitals rather than any fault in the work of physicians and surgeons.

People in the middle ages didn’t understand how diseases were spread and so little attempt was made to ensure cleanliness in hospitals. An ill person would be more prone to infection and would be surrounded by other infected people, meaning they would be likely to contract extra illnesses whilst in the hospital.

To our modern eyes, many of the medical theories of the middle ages seem primitive and superstitious. But most of the basic functions of the human body were already understood and ambitious surgical procedures could be carried out, sometimes with success. In the medieval world, when life could seem so dangerous and unpredictable, prayer and plant remedies must have seemed to have been some form of control and comfort for those affected by illnesses they didn’t understand.