Medieval Illness Cures: What Worked and What Did Not

Medieval illness cures mixed herbal medicine, bloodletting, surgery, prayer and charms, and most learned treatment rested on the theory that disease came from imbalanced humours. Honey on wounds and the setting of fractures could genuinely help. Routine bloodletting and many plague remedies did little or caused harm.

Key Facts About Medieval Illness Cures

• Core theory: Humoral theory, drawn from Hippocratic traditions and systematised by Galen, held that illness came from an imbalance of blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.
• Remedies with real value: Honey on wounds, wine and vinegar for washing them, and surgical work such as setting fractures and draining abscesses could help in particular cases. An Old English eye salve from Bald's Leechbook also showed activity against MRSA in 2015 laboratory and mouse tests.
• Common treatments: Bloodletting, purging, diet, herbal medicines, charms, prayers and pilgrimage.
• Who treated people: University-trained physicians served mainly the wealthy and worked mostly in towns and courts. Most people relied on family, neighbours, local healers, midwives, monks, nuns and priests.
• Church influence: Canon 22 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) told physicians called to the sick to urge them to send for a priest before all else, because bodily illness was sometimes caused by sin.
• Black Death: The plague is generally held to have reached England in 1348 and probably killed between a third and a half of the population, with wide regional variation. No contemporary treatment is known to have reliably controlled it.
• Leprosy: There was no effective cure. Leper houses combined charity, religious care and, in some places, formal separation, and practice varied widely.
• Regulation: An Act of 1511, in the early reign of Henry VIII, required physicians and surgeons to be licensed by a bishop. In and around London that meant the Bishop of London or the Dean of St Paul's.

In 1511, an Act of parliament complained that smiths, weavers and women were taking on serious cures. The complaint is revealing, because it names the kind of people who, by implication, had been doing much of the everyday healing in England for generations. It also marks a point where a long argument about who could treat the sick, and who could afford to be treated, reached the statute book.

Medieval medicine usually gets judged by its worst moments: the bowls of blood, the urine flasks, the plague remedies. Some of that judgement is fair. Some is not, because honey on a wound could do more good than the theory around it. This article sorts the remedies that worked from those that failed, then asks who could offer treatment, who could pay for it, and what the Church said illness meant.

The Theory Behind the Treatment

Learned medicine in medieval Europe rested on a shared model of the body. Humoral theory, which drew on Hippocratic writings and was systematised by the Greek physician Galen, held that the body contained four fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Health meant balance. Illness meant one humour had grown too strong or too weak, and the physician's job was to correct it, as much through diet and daily regimen as through drugs.

Medieval physician inspects a urine flask

The logic was consistent, which is more than can be said for the results. A fever, being hot and dry, called for cooling food and sometimes bleeding. A heavy, damp, phlegmatic complaint called for warming spices. Diagnosis leaned on the pulse and on urine, which physicians held up in a glass flask and compared against colour charts; the flask became their emblem in manuscript illustrations. Many almanacs also carried a zodiac man, a diagram giving each part of the body to a star sign. The scheme guided when a barber or surgeon should avoid bleeding or cutting a given part, for instance while the moon sat in the sign that ruled it.

Astrology was an important part of learned medicine, especially for timing treatment and explaining epidemics, though its weight varied by practitioner and place. When the Paris medical faculty, one of the most prestigious in Europe, produced its report on the plague in 1348, it attributed the corruption of the air to a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in March 1345.

What May Have Worked

Some of the practical medicine held up better than the theory behind it. Honey, which has genuine antibacterial properties, went onto wounds, and wine and vinegar were used to wash them, although nobody at the time knew why they might help and none of it amounted to modern antiseptic practice. Surgeons set fractures, lanced abscesses, cauterised bleeding vessels and cut for bladder stone, a dangerous operation. John Arderne, an English surgeon of the fourteenth century, made his name operating on anal fistula, a miserable condition with few other remedies, and wrote up his methods along with advice on what to charge wealthy patients.

Pain relief existed on paper at least. Surgical texts associated with Salerno describe a sponge soaked in opium, hemlock, mandrake and henbane, dried, then dampened and held to the patient's nose before an operation. Historians disagree about how often anyone used it and how well it worked, and the dose would have been a gamble.

Anglo-Saxon healer mixes garlic, leeks and wine in a brass bowl

Old English medicine left its own evidence. Bald's Leechbook, copied in the tenth century, takes its name from a colophon saying that a man called Bald owned the book and had a scribe, Cild, make it. Leech was the Old English word for a doctor. Its eyesalve for a wen in the eye, usually taken to mean a stye, though the precise meaning of the Old English word is debated, combined garlic, onion or leek, wine and oxgall. When Nottingham researchers recreated it in 2015, it showed strong activity against Staphylococcus aureus in laboratory biofilms and artificial wound infections, and killed up to about 90 per cent of MRSA in infected mouse wounds. None of the ingredients worked alone. No one has shown that the salve is safe or effective in a human eye, so the result is evidence of laboratory activity, not of clinical success. It does suggest that trial and error over generations could sometimes produce something with a real effect.

What Almost Certainly Did Not

Bloodletting was the workhorse of the system, though how often it was used varied. It was scheduled by the calendar and the phase of the moon, performed by physicians, surgeons and barbers, and built into the regimes of some monastic houses: monks were bled at set intervals, with rest and better food afterwards. There is no reliable evidence that routine bloodletting improved general health, and for a patient already weakened by fever it probably removed blood the body needed. Purging with laxatives and emetics followed the same reasoning, that excess humour had to be expelled. It was risky and diagnosis could not guide it reliably, although some purgatives did have genuine effects.

Medieval barber-surgeon in a scene of bloodletting

Recipes for theriac, the all-purpose antidote, varied widely, but many were compounded from dozens of ingredients, opium among them and viper flesh in the classic versions. The opium would have dulled pain, which may explain its reputation. Mercury went into ointments for skin disease.

The Black Death exposed the limits of all of it. The plague is generally held to have reached England at Melcombe Regis in Dorset in 1348, probably in the summer, and to have spread across much of the country through 1349. It killed somewhere between a third and a half of the population, with wide regional variation. Plague tracts recommended avoiding bad air, burning aromatic wood, carrying posies, drinking vinegar, taking pills of aloe, myrrh and saffron and, in some cases, lancing the swollen buboes, in varying combinations. Avoiding the sick and leaving affected settlements were among the few measures that could plausibly reduce exposure, though they cured no one and only people with somewhere else to go could take them.

Charms, Saints and the King's Touch

A second pharmacy ran alongside the first. Old English medical collections such as Lacnunga mix herbs with spoken charms, and its Nine Herbs Charm sets a pagan god beside Christian formulae. Later charms stopped bleeding with the story of Longinus, the soldier who pierced Christ's side, or eased toothache through St Apollonia, whose teeth were said to have been broken in her martyrdom. Saints had specialities, which varied by region. Blaise was invoked for the throat, Roch and Sebastian against plague, Margaret in childbirth.

Medieval pilgrims at St Winefride's Well

Pilgrims took the same needs to wells and shrines. St Winefride's Well at Holywell in Flintshire drew the sick for centuries, and royal visitors followed them. The chronicler Adam of Usk records Henry V walking from Shrewsbury to Holywell to give thanks for Agincourt, a pilgrimage traditionally dated to 1416.

Prayer and physic were not rivals. Physicians prescribed prayer, and priests handed out herbs. Where the line fell between a legitimate charm and sorcery depended on whose name was invoked and who was asking, and that ambiguity helps explain why village healers were so exposed when attitudes hardened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Kings offered the grandest cure of all. By the later Middle Ages English monarchs were touching sufferers of scrofula, a swelling of the neck glands later called the King's Evil. Edward I's household accounts, as analysed by Marc Bloch, record anything from several hundred to over a thousand people touched in a year. Scrofula can improve without treatment, so some recoveries were inevitable. Each one counted as proof that the king's body carried divine authority, which makes the ceremony hard to separate from politics.

The King's Touch

The Church in the Sickroom

In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council issued canon 22. It ordered physicians, when called to the sick, to urge them first of all to call for a priest, forbade them to prescribe anything that might endanger the soul, and threatened offenders with exclusion from the Church. The canon's own reasoning was that bodily illness sometimes comes from sin.

Consider what that meant where physicians obeyed it. The first thing a patient heard from the doctor was a reminder to put their soul in order, and recovery and death alike could be read as moral verdicts. Religious houses already kept infirmaries and herb gardens, and many hospitals were religious foundations, so the canon extended an existing Church presence in healing into the sickroom itself.

Church in the Sickroom

Leprosy is often presented as the clearest case of medieval exclusion, and that picture is easy to overstate. No effective cure existed, although physicians did prescribe diets, baths and ointments. A person diagnosed with the disease might be directed to a leper house, and England had hundreds of them, many of them small. These foundations combined charity, religious discipline and care, and their residents kept varying degrees of contact with family, property and local society. Formal separation existed in some places, and some sufferers begged with a clapper or bell to warn others, but historians now treat the older picture of ritual exile with caution.

Who Could Afford a Cure

Money shaped most outcomes. University-trained physicians, schooled at Oxford and Cambridge or abroad at places such as Paris and Montpellier, charged fees beyond most households and clustered in cities and around courts, though some also served religious houses and town authorities. Many remedies called for imported spices such as saffron, ginger and cinnamon, which were often beyond the means of ordinary labourers. The poor relied on gardens and hedgerows, on neighbours, on the parish priest, and on whatever charity a monastery or hospital offered.

Home remedies used by the poor

Hospitals varied widely. Many were almshouses or hospices offering shelter, food and prayer, and some offered nursing and medical care. St Bartholomew's in London, founded in 1123 by Rahere, cared for the sick poor within a religious foundation. According to the later account of his life, Rahere fell ill on pilgrimage to Rome and vowed to found a hospital if he recovered. A hospital still operates on the same Smithfield site, though not in the original buildings.

Much of the everyday work fell to women, who ran the household medicine chest and attended births. They left little trace in a written record kept by literate male professions, so the scale of their work is hard to measure. Some traditions did get written down. The medical texts attributed to the physicians of Myddfai in Carmarthenshire, which survive in manuscripts including the Red Book of Hergest, preserve herbal knowledge associated with a family of hereditary healers, although the manuscripts do not prove an unbroken family practice. Legend says they learned their art from a lake maiden, which tells us how the family was remembered rather than where their knowledge came from.

Then the state moved in. London's barbers and surgeons were forming fellowships and guilds from the fourteenth century onwards. The 1511 Act, passed in the early reign of Henry VIII, regulated physicians and surgeons rather than every act of informal care. In London and within seven miles of it, candidates needed approval from the Bishop of London or the Dean of St Paul's, with expert assistance, and elsewhere from the diocesan bishop or his vicar-general. The arrangements were soon reworked, with a College of Physicians chartered in London in 1518. The Act's preamble complained that smiths, weavers and women were taking on serious cures, and its stated aim was to protect patients from ignorant practitioners. Whether protection or control was the stronger motive is open to argument, but the smiths, weavers and women named in the preamble leave no doubt about who its drafters thought did not belong.

Frequently Asked Questions About Medieval Illness Cures

What were the most common medieval cures for illness?

Learned physicians relied mainly on bloodletting, purging, diet and herbal medicines, all aimed at restoring the balance of the humours. Alongside these ran charms, prayers, pilgrimage and household remedies. Much everyday care was informal and local, so what a sick person received depended heavily on where they lived and what they could pay.

What did medieval people believe caused illness?

Most learned medicine blamed an imbalance of the four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Corrupted air and the influence of the stars were also cited, especially during epidemics. The Church added a moral explanation, since canon 22 of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 said that bodily illness sometimes comes from sin.

Did any medieval cures actually work?

Some practical measures could help. Honey has antibacterial properties and went onto wounds, wine and vinegar were used to wash them, and surgeons set fractures and drained abscesses, although nobody understood infection as we do. An Old English eye salve from Bald's Leechbook also showed activity against MRSA in 2015 laboratory and mouse tests, but no one has shown that it works in a human eye.

Did medieval bloodletting work?

Bloodletting meant removing blood to correct a humoral imbalance, and it was often scheduled by the calendar and the phase of the moon. There is no reliable evidence that routine bloodletting improved general health, and for a patient weakened by fever it probably removed blood the body needed. How often it was used varied by place and practitioner.

How did medieval people treat the Black Death?

Plague tracts recommended avoiding bad air, burning aromatic wood, carrying posies, drinking vinegar, taking pills of aloe, myrrh and saffron and, in some cases, lancing the swollen buboes. No contemporary treatment is known to have reliably controlled the disease. Avoiding the sick and leaving affected settlements could plausibly reduce exposure, but only people with somewhere else to go could do it.

Who treated the sick in medieval England?

University-trained physicians served mainly wealthy patients in towns and courts. Surgeons and barbers handled bleeding, wounds and operations, while monks, nuns and priests kept infirmaries and herb gardens. Most people relied on family, neighbours, midwives and local healers, and women did much of the household work, although it left little trace in the written record.

Could ordinary people afford medical care in the Middle Ages?

Often not. Physicians charged fees beyond most households, and many remedies called for imported spices such as saffron, ginger and cinnamon, which were often beyond the means of ordinary labourers. The poor relied on gardens and hedgerows, on neighbours, on the parish priest and on whatever charity a monastery or hospital offered.

What role did the Church play in medieval medicine?

The Church kept infirmaries and herb gardens, and many hospitals were religious foundations. Canon 22 of 1215 told physicians called to the sick to urge them to send for a priest before all else, because illness might be caused by sin. In effect, it extended an existing Church presence in healing into the sickroom itself.

How was leprosy treated in the Middle Ages?

No effective cure existed, though physicians prescribed diets, baths and ointments. A person diagnosed with leprosy might be directed to a leper house, and these foundations combined charity, religious discipline and care. Practice varied widely. Formal separation existed in some places, but historians now treat the older picture of universal ritual exile with caution.

What was the royal touch?

The royal touch was a ceremony in which monarchs touched people suffering from scrofula, a swelling of the neck glands later called the King's Evil. Edward I's household accounts, as analysed by Marc Bloch, record anything from several hundred to over a thousand people touched in a year. Scrofula can improve without treatment, so some recoveries were inevitable, and each one reinforced the idea of divine kingship.

Did the law regulate medieval healers?

An Act of 1511, passed in the early reign of Henry VIII, required physicians and surgeons to be licensed by a bishop. In and around London that meant the Bishop of London or the Dean of St Paul's. Its preamble complained that smiths, weavers and women were taking on serious cures, although the Act regulated physic and surgery rather than every act of informal care.

Medieval Illness Cures Educational Infographic 

References and Sources

• University of Nottingham press release, "AncientBiotics: a medieval remedy for modern day superbugs?" (30 March 2015): Supports the ingredients (garlic, onion or leek, wine and oxgall), the brass vessel and nine-day brewing, and the figure of up to 90 per cent of MRSA killed in "in vivo" mouse wound biopsies. I have not read the published paper's methods
• Wikipedia, "Royal touch": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_touch. Gives a figure of up to 1,736 people a year for Edward I.
• Wikipedia, "Les Rois thaumaturges" (Bloch's study): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Rois_thaumaturges. Summarises English numbers as ranging from several hundred to over a thousand depending on the year.
• The Spectator, "Royal Healers", 19 August 1911: https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/19th-august-1911/20/royal-healers. Gives 533 people touched in April 1278.
• Catholic Herald: https://catholicherald.co.uk/?p=88038. Says the pilgrimage is recorded in Adam of Usk's chronicle, but historians do not know the precise date.
• Shrewsbury Orthodox page on St Winefride: https://shrewsburyorthodox.com/?p=1737. Says Adam of Usk has Henry V travelling on foot from Shrewsbury in 1416.

What to Read Next

• Medieval Illness Cures: What Worked and What Did Not: the remedies that worked from those that failed, then asks who could offer treatment, who could pay for it, and what the Church said illness meant.
• The Black Death: Origins and Impact: The epidemic that tested medieval medicine to its limits, and exposed every weakness in the humoral system
• The Black Death as a Catalyst of Social and Economic Change: How the same plague that defeated medieval medicine also accidentally broke the feudal system
• Overview of the Middle Ages: The broader context of the medieval world in which this system of healthcare operated
• The Middle Ages in England: The social and institutional world that produced the monasteries, physicians, and apothecaries described in this article
• The Role of the Church in Medieval Justice: How the same institution that ran hospitals also shaped law and punishment in medieval England
  

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