Healing and Society in Medieval England
ISBN: 9780299129330
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Wisconsin Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Pharmacy; History of Medicine Medieval; Medicine Medieval;

Originally composed in Latin by Gilbertus Anglicus (Gilbert the Englishman), his Compendium of Medicine was a primary text of the medical revolution in thirteenth-century Europe. Composed mainly of medicinal recipes, it offered advice on diagnosis, medicinal preparation, and prognosis. In the fifteenth-century it was translated into Middle English to accommodate a widening audience for learning and medical "secrets."
Faye Marie Getz provides a critical edition of the Middle English text, with an extensive introduction to the learned, practical, and social components of medieval medicine and a summary of the text in modern English. Getz also draws on both the Latin and Middle English texts to create an extensive glossary of little-known Middle English pharmaceutical and medical vocabulary.


Faye Marie Getz lives in Norfolk, England, and has honorary academic appointments in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. She appeared as a medieval physician in Terry Jones' Medieval Lives , an Emmy-nominated BBC documentary.

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