This course was developed as a pilot course by Conan Doyle PhD and taught at the Faculty of Humanites, Charles University. This course was conceived as a way to impart some of Doyles research into Old English and Latin medical literary culture, including his recent monograph The Reception of Latin Medicine in Early Medieval England (York Medieval Press, 2025).
The course will introduce methods and topics for the study of pre-modern Western medicine, that is medicine practiced primarily in Western Europe from the time of the Roman Empire to the establishment of prestigious medical faculties at Universities throughout Europe. The history of medicine is not just the history of great doctors, but is also the history of the diseases that every human suffered, from deadly pandemics such as the Black Death to the natural processes of birth, aging and death. The course is directly informed by the instructor’s previous publications and ongoing research agenda.
While the course argues strongly against scientific positivism and text based retrospective diagnosis, the impact of recent developments in genetic sequencing of human remains and the pathogens which affected past populations is also considered insofar as it has reshaped our understanding of past diseases.
Students will gain an understanding of the history of pre-modern medicine, learning about the types of primary source documents available, the major historiographic and methodological trends of the discipline.
Upon completion, students will be able to:
Students will be assessed on the basis of a short mid-term essay (25%) and an extended essay (75%) due at the end of the semester.
The final essay must be written in MHRA style (or another relevant style), and must demonstrate critical engagement with both primary source material and with scholarly secondary literature relevant to the field.
A list of suggested topics will be provided, though students are free to choose their own research topic for the final paper, so long as it pertains to the history of pre-modern medicine, health or disease (broadly defined).
Week 1: Introducing pre-modern medicine: The Four Humours
This lecture introduces the various methods of studying the history of pre-modern medicine, with stern warnings against retrospective diagnosis based on textual evidence alone (see Edge, “Diagnosing the Past”), and an attempt to understand the prevailing systems of thought which informed medical theory from antiquity to the middle ages: namely the theory of four humours and their corresponding physical and elemental properties
Required Reading:
Edge, J., “Diagnosing the Past” Wellcome Collection Stories Blog. 26 September 2018.
Recommended Reading:
Doyle, C., ‘Humoral and Elemental Theory in Early Medieval English Medicine’ in Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World: Vernacular Texts and Traditions ed. by Deborah Hayden and S. Baccianti (Brepols 2025) doi.org/10.1484/M.KSS-EB.5.143980
Horden, P., 'What's Wrong with Early Medieval Medicine?', Social History of Medicine 24.1 (2011), 5-25 doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkp052
Palmer, J. T., ‘Bede’s Medical Books.’ Early Medieval England and its Neighbours 51. 2025;. doi:10.1017/ean.2025.10004
Week 2: Purity and Danger: pollution, ritual and public health
This lecture continues to argue against teleological or scientific positivist interpretations of hygiene rules such as those of Leviticus, or medieval penitential manuals first with the analytical framework of ritual purity introduced by the anthropologist Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger) and taken up by historians of Medicine such as Peregrine Hordern
Required Reading:
Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and tabboo, 2nd edition (Routledge, 1996) Selected chapters
Recommended Reading:
Horden, Peregrine, ‘Ritual and Public Health in the Early Medieval City’ in Body and City ed. by Sally Shepherd and Helen Power, (Routledge, 2000) pp. 17–41
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315261430
Week 3: Prayer and Prognostication
This lecture considers some elements of pre-modern medical practice which seem most alien to modern sensibilities, namely astrological prognostication and ritual incantations and prayers. Although the majority of the readings focus on Early English material, examples will also be shown from other cultures, such as the Hellenic incantations in the works of Marcellus of Bordeaux. As a short coda, we consider the continuity of incubation rituals in the Basilica of Kosmas and Damian built over the Asklepion of Athens.
Required Reading:
Arthur, Ciaran, Charms Liturgies and Secret Rites (Boydell & Brewer; 2018). Selected chapters
Recommended Reading:
Beumer, Mark, ‘From Asklepieion to Kosmidion? Temple Sleep: A Dynamic Ritual in Late Antiquity’ in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Medicine, ed. by Tomaš Alušík et. al. (Archaeopress 2026), pp. 226–236
Doyle, C. T. ‘Dweorg in Old English’ Quastio Insularis 9 (2009) 99–117 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329516201_Dweorg_in_Old_English_Aspects_of_Disease_Terminology
Olsen, Karen E. E., ‘The Lacnunga and its Sources: The Nine Herbs Charm and Wið Færstice Reconsidered’ Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 55 (2007) 23–31.
Week 4: Diet, exercise and sex?
This lecture returns to the topic of ancient humoural theory and considers its role in shaping therapeutic practices, via control of what are later termed the res non naturales or ‘six non-naturals’ using specific examples from both Galenic texts, and demonstrating how the adaptation of these texts to a different climates, like early medieval England could be problematic for early medieval medical writers and practitioners. We see that medical practitioners have been giving advice on what to eat, and how much sleep and exercise are advisable for millenia, while we also consider medical attitudes to sex, from the rather prudish advice of Oribasius of Pergamnon, to the far more pragmatic advice of Constantinus Africanus on how to cure love-sickness.
Required Reading:
Doyle, C. T. ‘Foods for Body and Soul: The Application of Late Antique Regimen in Old English Medical Texts’ in Cultivating the Earth, Nurturing the Body and Soul: Daily Life in Early Medieval England ed. by C. Voth (Brepols, 2025) pp. 267–93.
Recommended Reading:
Totelin L. ‘When foods become remedies in ancient Greece: The curious case of garlic and other substances’, J Ethnopharmacol 167 (2015), 30-7 doi: 10.1016/j.jep.2014.08.018.
Week 5: Medicine for women: gynaecology and obstetrics from Soranus to Hildegard of Bingen
Human reproduction has been a central topic of medicine, philosophy and society since antiquity. But how did ancient and medieval authors view reproduction. In this lecture we consider several diverging theories of conception, from the Aristotelian single seed model, to the Galenic two seed model which was enthusiastically supported by the medieval Polymath Hildegard of Bingen.
Recommended Reading:
Doyle, C. T., ‘Gynaecology in the Priory? Contextualising the Gynaecological Fragments in London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A III’ in Early Medieval Medicine in Context: Transmission, Translation and Transformation ed. by Debby Banham, Claire Burridge and Lea Olsan (York Medieval Press, 2025)
Week 6: Medicine by women: Trota and the Salernitans
Women have most likely been involved in healthcare since the first time a Homo Sapiens tribe decided to care for a sick member rather than abandoning them to die. Yet women are often invisible in the institutional histories of medicine in a teleological sense due to their historical exclusion from institutions such as Universities and surgeons’ guilds.
We consider Monica Green’s seminal work examining the invisibility of those women who did practice medicine in medieval times from the documentary record, and also consider some other historiographical myths such as the myth of the ‘midwife-witch’ perpetuated by Margaret Alice Murray in the 1920s, and widely popular today despite having been thoroughly debunked by academic historians of medieval medicine over 35 years ago.
Required Reading:
Harley, David, ‘Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch’, Social History of Medicine, 3.1 (1990), 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/3.1.1
Recommended Reading:
Green, M.H. Women's Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (1st ed.). (Routledge, 2000) https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003556855
Though I can’t assign this whole book for a single lecture, I thoroughly recommend every single chapter if you are interested in any part of this topic.
Week 7: Madness and Civilisation: premodern psychiatry
The core message of this lecture is that the ancient and medieval medical authors did not conceive of the mind as a separate entity to the body, and could conceive of mental illnesses as diseases specifically as diseases of the brain arising from physiological disturbances there, or in other organs. On the other hand, the belief in demons and divine spirits continued both as a literal belief, and a continuing conceptual metaphor from antiquity to the middle ages. While it would be remiss to discuss this topic without reference to Michell Foucault’s seminal work Madness and Civilisation, a more nuanced approach is encouraged which understand that modern psychiatric diagnostic categories are far less biologically based than the nosological systems of almost any other branch of medicine.
Required Reading:
Metzger, Nadine, ‘”Not a Daimon, but a Severe Illness”: Oribasius, Posidonius and Later Ancient Perspectives on Superhuman Agents Causing Disease’, in Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine: From Celsus to Caelius Aurelianus, ed. by P. Singer and C. Thumiger, Studies in Ancient Medicine 50 (Brill 2018), pp. 79–106.
Recommended Reading:
Doyle, Conan T., ‘Temperament and Emotion: Embodied Emotion in Late Antique Medical Thought and Modern Paradigm Shifts in Neuroscience’ in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Medicine, ed. by Alušík et. al. (Archeopress, 2026) pp. 237–46.
Foucault, Michelle, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason trans. Richard Hower (Routledge, 2000) Introduction only
Week 8: The Mycobacterial Menace: Leprosy and Tuberculosis
This first of two lectures on leprosy in the middle ages begins with an overview of the biological mechanisms of infection by Mycobaterial pathogens, including both M. Leprae (responsible for Hansen’s disease) and M. Tuberculosis (responsible for tuberculosis). We consider the theory, posited almost a century ago, that the spread of M. Tuberculosis may have been partly responsible for the disappearance of Leprosy from Western Europe, and then begin the complex task of unpacking the social and historical significance of such a visibly disfiguring disease. We then further consider the complex identities of the medieval ‘leper’ who could include kings such as Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, knights such as the Knights of Lazarus, the most wretched poor, and those blessed by undergoing purgatory on earth.
Required reading:
Marcombe, David, Leper Knights: The Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem in England, c.1150-1544 (Boydell, 2004) – selected chapters
Recommended reading:
Lee, Christina, ‘Changing faces: leprosy in Anglo-Saxon England’ in Conversion and colonization in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by, C Karkov and N. Howe, (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006). pp. 59–81
Richards, Peter, The Medieval Leper and his Northern Heirs (D. S. Brewer, 1997), selected chapters
Week 9: Hospitals and Hospitality
In the previous lecture we considered the leprosarium as the prototypical hospital for the care of the sick, but there were many other models. Precisely defining a hospital is difficult in pre-modern periods. There is the institutional model, based on foundation charters and institutional records, which leads Peregrine Horden to suggest that the were no hospitals in pre-Norman England, and there is the archaeological model, which looks for signs of long-term care of sick or incapacitated patients, which suggests that some early medieval English monastic foundations may have functioned as hospitals, albeit with a limited, probably elite clientele.
Required reading:
Horden, Peregrine, ‘The Earliest Hospitals in Byzantium, Western Europe, and Islam’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35.3 (2005), 361–85.
Recommended reading:
Horden, Peregrine, ‘Were there Hospitals in England Before the Normans? in Cultivating the Earth, Nurturing the Body and Soul: Daily Life in Early Medieval England, ed. by C. Voth pp. 65-89 https://doi.org/10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.143381
Week 10: Kitchen Table Medicine: The Physica Plinii in Czech Manuscripts, and why it matters
Most surveys of the history of medicine either make an extreme division around the year 1100, between the monkish and superstitious medicine which preceded that date, and the enlightened and cosmopolitan medicine which followed, or simply ignore the Latin literature of the 1st millennium AD entirely, and begin with the semi-hagiographic accounts of Constantine the African’s contribution to the school of Salerno. Yet in a small municipal museum in south Bohemia, I have discovered that not only did a collection of 1st millennium medical text exist, which had been copied in the late 14th century, and had seen continual use until, most likely the 18th.
In this lecture I will highlight how the new science of biocodicology can shed light on the use of medical books, based in part on research which has not been published at the time that this syllabus is in preparation, and involves collaboration with colleagues in the Institute of the History of Medicine, 1st Medical Faculty in Prague, and the Department of Analytical Chemistry at Masarkovo Univerzita, Olomouc.
Required Reading
Recommended Reading
Week 11: Y. Pestis in History I: Prehistoric and Historic plague pandemics
Of all diseases, the ‘Black Death’ perhaps evokes most fear and imagination. Yet the Black death refers uniquely to a single pandemic event which spread in Asia, Europe and Africa in the mid 14th Century. The organism which causes this disease has been shaping human history for millennia. Most pandemic events involving this pathogen seem to have occurred shortly after massive cooling events caused by volcanic eruptions, demonstrating the extremely fragile relationship between the climate and the terrestrial biome in which we live. Such evens can be located at many major material culture boundaries. This lecture will possible consider the pre-historic occurrences of the Plague, as well as the first one to be recorded in the historical record, namely the Plague of Justinian.
Required Reading:
Peter Sarris, Viewpoint New Approaches to the ‘Plague of Justinian’, Past & Present, Volume 254, Issue 1, February 2022, Pages 315–346, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab024
Recommended Reading:
Week 12: Y. Pestis in History II: Social reactions from prayers to pogroms (the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves)
Social and political reactions to pandemic events have often been extreme, xenophobic and even violent. In the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic, conspiracy theories abounded, even on mainstream medea that it was an escaped pathogen from a Chinese biological weapons laboratory, leading to widespread Sinophobic violence in the USA. In 14th century Europe, the targets of such violence were Jews. Yet these pogroms usually occurred in places not yet reached by the pandemic itself. In the century that followed, society was significantly reorganised due to the utterly changed relationship between the value of agricultural land compared to the value of agricultural labour.
Additional Bibliography
Alušík, Tomáš, Pavla Alušíková Dostalíková, Milena Melfi, Conan T. Doyle and Rupert Breitwieser, eds., Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Medicine: New Perspectives and Challenges for the Twenty-First Century (Archeopress, 2026) ISBN
1805832603 / 9781805832607
Black, Winston, ed., Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West: A History in Documents (Broadview Press, 2019) ISBN: 9781554813902 / 1554813905
Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and tabboo, 2nd edition (Routledge, 1996)
Doyle, Conan T. The Reception of Latin Medicine in Early Medieval England: Evidence from Old English Texts, Health and Healing in the Middle Ages 8 (York Medieval Press, 2025)
Green, Monica H., “Documenting Medieval Women’s Medical Practice,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis García-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 322-52
Kiple, K. F. The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Diseases (Cambridge University Press, 2003) ISBN 9780521808347
Palmer, J. T., Bede’s Medical Books. Early Medieval England and its Neighbours 51. 2025;. doi:10.1017/ean.2025.10004
Sarris, P., ‘Viewpoint New Approaches to the ‘Plague of Justinian’’, Past & Present, 254. 1, (2022), 315–346, doi: 10.1093/pastj/gtab024
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