Blessed Miracle Cures
Those who were sainted by the Catholic church during the Middle Ages were often credited with performing miracles during their lifetimes. After their death it was believed that the saint's relics, their body parts or on occasion their possessions, still retained miraculous healing powers.
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Sufferers would travel thousands to visit the churches where the saint's relics were enshrined hoping that touching the blessed objects would cure their afflictions. Sometimes miracles did occur and after making their pilgrimage, some people recovered from whatever ailed them, but mostly they didn't.
It's no longer the Middle Ages, but every year millions of people still set off on pilgrimages to visit shrines where saint's relics are interred seeking the miraculous. While the belief may be strong, the positive results are still pretty much on par with medieval times – almost nonexistent.
Sipping the Samples
Giving a urine sample to a doctor to send away to a laboratory for analysis is a run of the mill medical procedure these days. In the Middle Ages doctors didn't have laboratories to rely on, instead, like wine connoisseurs with a discerning palate, they would taste a patient's urine in an attempt to diagnose what illness they were suffering from.
Not only was the taste of the urine taken into consideration, but the color and smell as well. While uroscopy, diagnosing illness by examining urine, was a centuries-old medical practice even in medieval times, it was during the Middle Ages a diagnostic tool known as the urine wheel was introduced. The wheel was a circular diagram that aided practitioners to match a variety of urine colors, smells and tastes to twenty different afflictions of the time. It may sound simple, but in the Middle Ages it was a major medical advancement.