Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages (review)

Certain historical questions are driven more by the terms in which they were originally posed than by historical data themselves. The "conflict between religion and science (or scientific medicine)" has been one of these, the very term "conflict" inducing us to look for disagreements, turf battles, and heated confrontations. This extraordinary collection demonstrates the need to approach the pairing "religion and medicine" with new eyes.

In his introduction, Joseph Ziegler notes "the sheer entangledness of medicine and religion" (p. 8): medical doctors also took degrees in theology, the church provided for public health, religion could itself be perceived as medicinal. Rather than turning away from this entangledness, Ziegler suggests we embrace it, exploring why and how such intertwinings did not suffocate but, more often, stimulated the growth of both secular and ecclesiastical responses to disease.

Vivian Nutton shows how the prolific second-century pagan physician Galen, who believed deeply in a Creator (or Nature) that imbued purpose into the structure of every living thing, was made compatible with monotheism by Byzantine, Muslim, and Christian European interpreters from the second through the sixteenth centuries. In a wonderful irony, he was eventually seen to be a contemporary of Christ who died while on pilgrimage to see the sites of Christ's miracles.

Perhaps most important for its potential to overturn received opinion is Kathryn Taglia's essay, "Delivering a Christian Identity: Midwives in Northern French Synodal Legislation, c. 1200-1500." Taglia finds that, far from being oppressed or persecuted as witches, midwives were ignored by the church in northern France up until the early thirteenth century, with systematic references to them beginning only in the fourteenth century. The church's interest in midwives stems from its interest in baptism—the only sacrament that could be performed by a layperson, even a woman, if the newborn's life seemed in danger. Initially, parish priests instructed only parents in the formula for baptism, itself an indication that there was no universal assumption that a midwife would be present at every birth. By the fourteenth century, however, midwives are often mentioned as being the special object of such instruction. At the same time, a licensing procedure for midwives arises, involving election on a parish-by-parish basis and the granting of certificates of approval by the bishop's court. Similarly, none of the legislation regarding cesarean section (which also began in the early thirteenth century, due to concern for infant baptism) explicitly mentions midwives as the ones who would perform such procedures.

Jessalynn Bird's essay on Jacques de Vitry's early thirteenth-century sermons for hospital workers and inmates, and Peregrine Horden's essay on music as therapy, form a linked pair in asking how the history of hospitals should fit into a larger history of medieval medicine. It has usually been argued that, prior to the foundation of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence in the fifteenth century, no medieval hospital regularly provided real medical care for its inmates. Rather, hospitals were long-term shelters for the poor, the aged, or the chronically infirm, providing more "care" than "cure." Bird's evidence does indeed confirm that European hospitals need to be seen first and foremost as religious institutions. The first line of treatment was always seen as reconciliation with God through confession, and both the hospital staff and, in many cases, the inmates themselves were bound by the rules of religious orders. Nevertheless, Bird finds that there is also concern to restore humoral balance through the control of rest, diet, and other aspects of hygiene. Horden highlights the therapeutic uses of music to explore similar questions of how religion and religious practices may have themselves served as sources of therapy. Indeed, he raises the intriguing image of the hospital, with its liturgical rituals and (in some cases) daily music, serving as a "total therapeutic environment" (p. 139).

Peter Biller takes yet another tack on...