Medicine & Disease

While most people have heard of the Black Death, medieval Europe was also afflicted by a less deadly but more perplexing epidemic: the English sweating sickness.

‘Man has made himself what he is today.’ Joe Rogaly writes how important biological changes have recently transformed his whole existence.

John Henderson challenges received ideas on how medieval and early modern societies dealt with perils such as plague.

The notorious malady of the 18th century is on the increase in the UK.

Louis C. Kleber describes how, for the American Indians, ‘medicine’ was a spiritual belief as well as a curative.

In England, medieval hospitals flourished until the beginning of the 15th century, funded by taxes, tolls, and wealthy doners. 

Frances Austin reads the lively late eighteenth century letters of a great surgeon’s apprentice to his family in Cornwall.

J.J.N. McGurk profiles Roger Bacon; a 13-century Franciscan, with a reputation as a necromancer, who showed a remarkable combination at Oxford and in Paris of philosophic and scientific gifts.

The problems of later life are always with us, writes Steven R. Smith. Among those who have studied them are both a famous philosopher and a renowned physician.