Medicine & Disease

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.

Stephen Usherwood describes how an Asiatic flea, living as a parasite upon black rats, caused as many as 100,000 deaths during the summer and autumn of 1665.

As judge, patron, landowner and courtier-administrator, Caesar successfully pursued his own ambitions. By Alan Haynes.

R.W. Davies describes how the Romans were often suspicious of doctors; and contemporary satirists, including Martial, cracked many jokes at their expense. Medicine, however, was now beginning to be practised on strictly scientific lines.