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Reviewed by:
  • Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
  • Joseph Ziegler
Angela Montford . Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. The History of Medicine in Context. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004. xv + 302 pp. Ill. $99.95, £57.50 (0-7546-3697-6).

This dense and scholarly study of the friars' attitudes toward illness contributes significantly to a better understanding of the relationship between Christianity and medicine in the Middle Ages. For the first time the student of medieval medicine has a comprehensive survey of a large variety of hitherto scattered and partly unprinted sources documenting the interaction between medicine and the mendicant orders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Eschewing the abstract philosophical and theological aspects of medicine and disease, Angela Montford studies, within the broader context of the convent's life and mendicant ideology, the more practical aspects of medicine and health care among the friars. The physical care of the secular sick was never the friars' specific responsibility, but the care of their own ill brothers was an inexorable Christian and fraternal obligation. For both orders, good health came to be regarded in a positive light: strength and physical well-being were regarded as vocational necessities.

Montford's focus is on the Dominican and the Franciscan orders in Bologna. A comparative analysis of the account books of S. Domenico in Bologna before and after 1348 proves that the mortality caused by the plague did not destroy the convent's health-care system: the friars were not abandoned by their physicians or their caregivers, the convent kept on directing resources to pay for physicians' visits as well as nursing for the sick friars, and secular medical help was constantly sought by friars.

Much of the book presents a meticulous study of the function of the infirmary and the infirmarers within the convent, portraying their central role in the friars' daily life and the convent's economy. The infirmary itself catered normally to all the sick, friars and secular alike. It occasionally provided single cells to scholars within the convent who were in need of quiet and a nourishing diet. Sophisticated arrangements were made to fund treatment; the infirmary relied on external donations, but mainly on direct funding from the convent's budget, as the accounts make clear. Special attention was paid to the dietary regime for the healthy and the sick: the Dominican accounts suggest that with the exception of meat, the friars enjoyed dietary standards similar to those of the wealthier and better-fed members of north Italian society. Special food (enriched by meat portions) for the sick involved the convent in extra expenses, which were considered necessary and worthwhile. Much of the nursing, pharmacy, and medicine was originally predominantly domestic or internal. In the orders' first two centuries at least, most of the senior infirmarers were lay brothers (conversi) and theoretical [End Page 160] medical or pharmaceutical knowledge was not essential for their work; pursuing mainly nursing tasks, their post was kept distinct from that of the frater medicus, the friar who had studied medicine and practiced it within the convent. The papal prohibitions forbidding religious men to leave their convents for the study of medicine and law restricted medical learning among the friars, and inevitably, there was a gradual decline of the frater medicus. From 1348 (perhaps due to the shortage of friars in times of significant mortality), even the conversi were losing their prominent role in the infirmary, which was increasingly operated by hired lay professionals (secular servants and external physicians, including some women phlebotomers and shavers).

All this investment of energy and resources into the friars' health care suggests that, for them, sickness was not a matter for stoical acceptance, nor was it shaped solely by theological and philosophical concerns. At no stage were the demands of the body despised or ignored.

This picture of the friars' deep involvement in medical practice adds a new variable to the explanation of their interest in medicine as revealed in the theological, spiritual, and exegetical writings they produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Some questions are left unanswered: for example, is there really no difference...

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