Sometime in the 1220s CE, a young woman named Ida was walking the city streets of Leuven in Belgium when she was called into the home of a dying man. The sick man was so certain of his imminent death that he had already summoned a priest to administer last rites. Entering his home and having learned something of his affliction – its duration, symptoms and the source of his pain – Ida fixed her eye upon the pestiferous tumour that vexed him. She promptly drained the tumour of its puss and – lo! – the man reported immediate results. The swelling and pain had diminished with Ida’s assistance. He made a full recovery.
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Ideas about medieval medicine often conjure images of men donning plague masks, carrying leech flasks, and sporting an assortment of backwards, painful and toxic remedies. Rarely do we imagine stories such as this one, of a woman’s bedside ministrations.
But the history of medieval medicine is one that might best be told from the perspective of quotidian acts of care. Hundreds of devout single women just like Ida dedicated their lives to active charity in which they cared for the poor, sick and indigent in private homes, in hospitals and on city streets.
Some of them acted as official caregivers who served as midwives or wetnurses, as nursing sisters in hospitals, or as nuns who maintained apothecary shops. Others bore no official titles whatsoever and charged no fees for their service. The kind of care they provided has remained invisible, though it was as essential to daily life in Europe as economic transactions, religious and civic festivities and the waging of wars that feature so prominently in our records of the Middle Ages. What is remarkable about Ida’s story, then, is not that she cared for this dying man in Leuven, but that it was recorded at all (in this case, by an unknown Cistercian monk).
Women were prominent in everyday care because healthcare was largely a preventative enterprise that took place in domestic, interior settings. Medical knowledge was as dynamic and fluid then as now, but therapeutic ideas from the Middle Ages were often transmitted through oral means as well as through informal, apprenticed training. The human body was commonly understood to consist of four fluid humours – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile – that fluctuated in relation and proportion to various internal and external factors. Since health and illness largely depended on humoral excesses or deficiencies, the task of health practitioners was to moderate the humours in search of balance. They tinkered with humoral flow through bloodletting, emetics, purgation and other manipulations of the body.