The Moon and Medicine in Chaucer’s Time

The Moon and Medicine in Chaucer's Time Laurel Braswell McMaster University Hamziton, Canada Chaucds Doctoc of Phisic, ,lbdt a man of prnfrssional, theo­ retical grounding in the medicine of Avicenna and others, is also presented as a professional physician well grounded in astrological medicine-the "science" of Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and others mentioned in his portrait. From such teachers he has become a "verray, parfi.t, praktisour."1 Whether or not we consider this statement as ironic and satiric, we should not fail to recognize the real possibility that Chaucer was simply being accurate, a possibility such scholars as Talbot, Ussery, Siraisi, andVoigts have convinc­ ingly argued through their study of the more academic documents of medieval medicine.2 A survey of medieval medical manuscripts, more­ over, indicates a central orientation within the position and nature of the moon as a basis for medical practice, principally with reference to Galenic humoral theory. At the core of this lunar premise lies the microcosm theory of astrological medicine. To summarize, one could simply say that the natural world (the 1 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. John H. Fisher (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977), GP, p. 17, line 422. This edition is cited throughout this article. 2 See, e.g., Charles H. Talbot, Medicine in Mediaeval England (London: Oldbourne, 1967); Huling E. Ussery, Chaucer's Physician: Medicine and Literature in Fourteenth­ Century England, Tulane Studies in English, vol. 19 (New Orleans, La.: Tulane University, Department ofEnglish, 1971), esp. p. 7; Nancy Siraisi, Arts and ScienceatPaduaBefore 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973); and, with reference to phle­ botomy, Linda E. Voigts and Michael R. McVaugh, A Latin Technical Phlebotomy and Its Middle English Translation, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 24, no. 2 (Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1984), especially pp. 11-25. For a list ofuniversity medical texts in relation to vernacular documents, see Linda Voigts, "Medical Prose," Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), pp. 315-35. 145 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER microcosm) mirrors the celestial (the macrocosm), that heavenly bodies provide the key to human conditions, and that, as Robertus Anglicus succinctlyphrases it in hiscommentary onJohn ofSacrobosco's Desphaera: "One cannot claim to know the causes of things if one does not know the movements and dispositions ofthe celestial bodies, for they themselves are the causes of earthly matters."3 To accept as Robertus Anglicus did that astronomical (i.e., astrological) knowledge based on the movements and properties of the moon is a prerequisite for medical practice would have required no cognitive leap for Chaucer's contemporaries. Familiar in many versions to Chaucer's contemporaries was the opening statement oftheLibel/us de medicorum astrologia, alternatively called the Astronomia and attributed to Hippocrates. It begins in Peter of Abano's translation of about 1310 as follows: Ypocras, who was a physician and a most worthy master, asked, "What manner of physicianis he who does not knowastronomy [medicus non astroniam zgnorat]? No one ought to place himself in the hands of any physician who is no less than perfect." I know this to be true [continues Peter], because when I examined the writings of Ypocras, I discovered in them a work on the science of astronomy, which, although brief, was indeed estimable.4 The precept that a physician should be competent in astrology was com­ monplace enough to find its way into the works ofmany medieval English writers, for example, Roger Bacon, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas of Lynn, and John Mandeville, none of them writing specifically about 3 Robertus Anglicus, Commentario, in The "Sphere" of Sacrobosco and Its Commen­ tators, Lynn Thorndike, ed. (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1949), pp. 143-44; "Non enim potest durare, si ignoret causam egritudinis, que quidem causa scire non potest, si ignoretur moms etdispositionemcorporum supercelestium, que est causa cuiuslibetdisposi­ tionis istorum inferiorum" ("For he is unable to persevere, if he fails to know the cause of a disorder, yet he will not know the cause ifhe is ignorant ofthe movement and disposition of the higher celestial bodies, which themselves cause the...