No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
The Practice of Medicine in Piers Plowman Rosanne Gasse A reader can hardly miss the language of medical practice that occurs throughout Piers Plowman. Contrition, Faith, and Conscience are called surgeons, patient Poverty is a leche, and of course Sire Penetrans Domos arrives in Unity as the physician-surgeon whose soft plasters paralyze his patient. The poem contains manifold references to various medicinal practices and tools such as purges, salves, plasters, herbal remedies, and medicinal preparations like triacle and other drugs. Many of the poem's most basic moral aphorisms are expressed in medical terms. "Mesure is medicine," advises Holy Church at B.1.35, later adding that "love is triacle of hevene" (1.148).1 The love of his subjects is the king's "tresor . . . and tryacle at [his] nede" (5.49), according to Reason. Triacle and salve are of course both pharmaceutical preparations. Yet because the metaphor of the priest as the physician of the soul is so widely disseminated in the literature of the Middle Ages, scholars have been quick to dismiss the medical language in Piers Plowman as only metaphor, without an important literal aspect.2 Overlooking the literal in this instance perpetuates, however, the common modern misperception that ancient and medieval medical theory and practice are rooted in the metaphysical and the superstitious. Samuel Bloom, for instance, hurries past the entire premodern period of medicine, summarizing it as follows: In the prevailing dualism of the body and the soul, of matter and the spirit, the body was the domain of the physician and the remainder of human experience the province of the philosopher or the priest.3 Bloom assumes the legitimacy of the dualism without question. But as Joseph Ziegler recently has argued, Ecclesiastical historians have written in terms of two separate sorts of medicine, where the superior one, medicine for the soul, was provided by the ecclesiastical agents, while the body was taken care [End Page 177] of by physicians and other medical practitioners. Medical historians have stressed the natural and religiously neutral character of the academic medicine that was developing at this period. This view is no longer satisfactory. Overlap, sometimes even ambiguity, now seems more appropriate to describe the relationship between medicine and theology, between the carers for bodies and for souls, between medical and spiritual approaches to disease.4 This essay follows Ziegler's path, examining the practice of medicine in Piers Plowman not as metaphor for something else, but as human craft. References to human acts of healing must not be restricted, as they have been, to the spiritual or metaphorical dimension in readings of the poem, but considered as evidence in their own right for what they can reveal about Langland's portrayal of medical practice and practitioners. Such a study will elucidate further our understanding of the context in which Langland wrote. Certainly, the age-old metaphor of sin as a disease is present in the text.5 Langland puns on the overlap between salve/save/salvation, medical cure/cure of souls, and doctor of medicine/doctor of theology. Through the medical metaphor he outlines the multiplicity of connections between the body politic and the human body; the body/blood of Christ and the body/soul of the Christian faithful; and the various divine, demonic, and human aspects of agency. Reason, for example, proves that "thise pestilences was for pure synne" (5.13), implying, as did many learned men in the fourteenth century, that it is a reasonable assumption that natural disasters like plague and destructive wind storms are divine warnings to improve human social behavior. Likewise the abstractions of Kynde, Elde, and Death, through their various physical manifestations— feveres and fluxes, Coughes and cardiacles, crampes and toothaches, Rewmes and radegundes and roynouse scalles, Biles and bocches and brennynge agues, Frenesies and foule yveles (20.81-85) —function as allies of Conscience in the battle against the forces of Antichrist. They act as blunt reminders of the failure of human flesh and therefore of the constant human need both for sacramental grace and individual spiritual commitment. Medicine is the means by which the effects of Kynde and Elde, if not Death, can be mitigated. The practitioners of medicine...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.