Medieval Medicine In The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a work written by Geoffrey Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales, medical practice, the perspective on the human body, and those who studied medicine during that time period is revealed through the Physician’s Tale in the General Prologue. The life of the Physician is told through this tale and one can see hints to how medicine was during the Medieval years. There were several factors that played a role in the medical practice back then, including religion and astronomy. Other ideas behind medical practice that are revealed through this specific account of the Physician’s lifestyle are means of diagnosis, financial gain, ethics, and social structure. All of these factors provide an overview of what the study of medicine

Here, the human body is compared to the elements and climate of the Earth. It attempts to explain a sickness through the temperature or physical appearance of the skin. This physician uses this perspective to diagnosis his patients as well. Chaucer writes, “He knew the cause of every maladye, were it of hoot or cold or moiste or drye and where engendred and of what humour.” (Lines 421-423) It seems simple enough, if the body was hot it meant one thing and if it was cold it meant another. Using the elements as a way to diagnosis was probably due to the lack of understanding of the human body beyond the outward appearance. Bringing religion back into the picture, we can relate the physical body back to Jesus. Jesus’ body on the cross was and still is an important figure in Christianity. One article argues that, “Indeed, Christ’s body serves also as a metaphor for the body politic, which ideally functions like the classical body, i.e. hierarchically structured and always under control.” (Nyffenegger, 2011) This sounds as though sickness and disease are blamed on sin entering into the world. All of these things are focused on the physical aspects of the body, showing how the field of medicine had not yet discovered the microscopic world, even if they knew it was there. This is why everything is based on physical knowledge, basically everything that could be detected with the five senses. So far, we see that the Earth and the sky were two defining physical elements in the field of medicine during the Medieval time