Medicine & Disease

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.

The great humanitarian organisation was founded on 29 October 1863.

Medicine in early modern Britain is commonly perceived as crude and ineffective. But for all its shortcomings, says Alun Withey, there was no shortage of medical practitioners.