Dragon's Blood & Willow Bark: The Mysteries of Medieval Medicine by Toni Mount

Author:Toni Mount [Mount, Toni]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2015-04-15T22:00:00+00:00

8

MALPRACTICE AND MISBEHAVIOUR – MEDICINE GOES TO COURT

A crooked apothecary can deceive folk well enough on his own, but

once he has teamed up with a physician then he can trick them

a hundred times over. One writes out the prescription and the other

makes it up, yet it costs a florin to buy what is not worth a button.

John Gower (c. 1330–1408)

As we saw in the previous chapter, in medieval times, many people preferred to consult unofficial medical practitioners, or else took a do-it-yourself approach to treatment when they were unwell. Perhaps the most obvious reason for this was the expense of seeing a professional, or the cost of having them attend you at home. As John Gower tells us in the epigraph above, there was also the fear of being overcharged for the cheapest of medicines. I am sure that the majority of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, wise women and midwives, were honest enough, just trying to make a living by helping the sick, but it only took one or two cases of fraud and deception to give medical practitioners in general a tarnished reputation. In this chapter, we will explore some of the less reputable aspects of medicine.

Overcharging and Getting Payment

One frequent complaint made against medical practitioners of all kinds concerned the prices they charged for their services. Royal physicians and surgeons could be very well paid. A yearly salary of £40 seems to have been usual during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but £150 wasn’t unknown and an extra daily rate was paid on top if the physician or surgeon served the army on campaign abroad. Pancius de Controne was a court physician to both Edward II and Edward III and received £150 per annum at one stage in his career.1 The Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III, in the mid-fourteenth century, paid his physician, William Blackwater, £40 per annum. When William retired, his pension was even more generous and included a clothing allowance in recognition of the good service he’d given the prince while he was able to work, presumably this being no longer the case.2

In the 1360s, William Tankerville, physician to the monks at Westminster Abbey, was being paid in both money and kind by the abbey: £4 a year plus a fur-trimmed robe befitting his profession at a cost of 26s 8d. In the accounts of 1368–69, his clothing allowance was raised to 30s 4d, so that he could have a robe ‘with three furs’.3 Was that a particularly cold winter and the monks didn’t want their physician going down with a chill when they were most in need of his services? This expensive robe may have been of the traditional colours of red and grey. William Langland, in his work The Vision of Piers Plowman, described a physician with his furred hood and his fine cloak decorated with gold buttons.4 This is Geoffrey Chaucer’s description of the Doctor in the prologue to his Canterbury Tales, wearing fine robes and coveting money:

In blood-red garments, slashed

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