[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.142 Medical practice presents a modest exception to this exclusion.Women could not study at universities, which barred them from the mostelite level of practice.There was no provision for them, or for midwiferypractice, in the comminalte.But on levels of practice not dominated by thepriesthood, women s presence was recognized, although women did notappear in positions of much power.The 1381 poll tax of the London suburb of Southwark, which stated theoccupations of every householder, noted 1 woman barber and 1 womanmidwife out of 137 women householders listed (by comparison, there was1 woman carpenter, 1 woman mason, and many, many more engaged inoccupations related to food and textile production).143 No evidence thateither of these women was a guild member survives, and it is likely theypracticed their trade independently.But of all the York craft guilds onlythe ordinances of the guild of barber-surgeons from the late fourteenthcentury allowed women to be apprentices.144London did not make such provisions, but there were other forms ofrecognition of women s importance to medical practice.In 1368 the mayorand aldermen of the City of London swore four master surgeons to policetheir craft, to ensure reasonable fees were charged, and to report to themayor and aldermen on these and other related matters.By 1389 anotheradmission had taken place, this time charging the masters to oversee bothmen and women practicing surgery.145 Later the Physicians Petition of1421 provided for women practicing medicine to be examined along withmen.The university and the municipality, as bodies that oversaw medical prac-titioners, acted to enable some groups to exercise their trade or profession.Sometimes, as in the case of the Physicians Petition or the comminalte,Crown, university, and municipality even cooperated to control practice.They also acted to establish certain standards of good practice, with verylimited success in the medieval period.And, in the case of legal authority,governments used the law and the organizations they permitted that weresubject to the law to preserve order and to protect the citizenry.The limitsof proper medical practice, the question of who should be a practitioner,and what he or she could be expected to know were still very much openeven in the late fifteenth century. CHAPTER VWell-Being without Doctors:Medicine, Faith, and Economy amongthe Rich and PoorTODAY people in developed countries have high expectations from scien-tific medicine and from the professionals and institutions that deliver it.Advances in public health, medicine, surgery, and related fields givewealthier people at least the hope that medicine will restore good healthand prolong life.And rightly so the state of modern scientific medicinewould have been almost unimaginable even fifty years ago.Also under-standable is the way medical historians have looked to the university-edu-cated physician as the ancestor of today s scientific medical practitioner.This point of view is well justified in that mastery of a set body of texts,which university education demanded of the medieval physician, remainsthe backbone of medical training.It may surprising, then, that medieval English people were far fromagreement that learned medicine was an important or even desirable ser-vice.Most were too poor even to dream of visiting a medical practitioner,but some who were rich enough avoided doctors by choice.Many of medi-eval England s social elite advocated pathways to well-being without resortto professional medical practitioners.At the other end of the social scale,the poor, the friendless, the elderly, and the chronically ill had no choicebut to rely on Christian charity, which was concerned with the more press-ing matters of food, shelter, and spiritual comfort than with what seemedlike minor complaints.The social elite and the dispensers and recipientsof Christian charity shared similar notions about well-being.Both groupsstressed sound diet, frugal living, and attention to spiritual matters overbodily concerns.The tradition of Roman Stoicism, based in large part on the writings ofPliny, informed the notions of well-being held by many medieval Englishpeople.Roger Bacon cited Pliny frequently on matters of health and, tyinghis arguments to Holy Scripture, reminded his readers how humanity sfirst sin was not so much disobedience but eating the wrong thing.By thefifteenth century, vernacular poets like John Lydgate and the Oxford chan-cellor, priest, and physician Gilbert Kymer wrote regimens of health thatwould allow the educated person to regulate his own lifestyle better to ap- 86 CHAPTER Vpreciate the nature of the good life.The object of Kymer s regimen, ofcourse, was his patron, the aspiring humanist and book collector Humfrey,duke of Gloucester,1 whose appetite for women, rather than for food, seemsto have worried his physician.The irony of a physician like Kymer adopting an intellectual stance im-plying Humfrey ought to be his own physician is obvious enough.But ifone considers Gilbert Kymer as the duke s teacher more than his doctor,then Kymer s attitude to his patron becomes clearer.The model for Kym-er s regimen was the Secretum secretorum, purported to be Aristotle s lettersto his student Alexander the Great.It was a model flattering both to Dr.Kymer and to Duke Humfrey.Some of Aristotle s advice was medical, butonly in that the king was taught to observe a healthful regimen.Otheradvice concerned how to choose a good servant, and assorted matters ofhousehold management.Learning how to live well by reading the works of the ancients and main-taining a healthful regimen to preserve vigor into a ripe old age are quali-ties we associate more with humanism and less with the scholastic medicinetaught at English universities, although the distinction between scholasticand humanistic approaches to learning are never clearly observed.2 Open-ness, simplicity, practical advice, and writing in the vernacular are also gen-erally humanistic qualities, especially in humanism s earlier forms.3Humanist devotion to openness and simplicity as manifested by writingin the vernacular and by reverence for the writings of the ancient Romanshad to a certain extent been present in England since the time of theAnglo-Saxons, who produced translations of late-antique Latin medicaltexts.The Norman Conquest in 1066 brought a new language of open-ness French but it was a foreign tongue, and by the last quarter of thefourteenth century, native pride in English again became apparent.4One of the first medical texts manifesting this resurgence of medicinein English was the uroscopy of Henry Daniel, written about 1379.5 Daniel,a Dominican friar, compiled his book on urines in English6 from a numberof Latin sources out of charitable motives because the more openly taughtsomething is, the more people will take it seriously. 7 English for Daniel,and for other vernacular translators, was not only a tool for teaching andopenness but also a rhetorical aid to persuade the reader of the usefulnessof this type of medicine
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]