Health and Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy (Medieval Mediterranean, Vol 11)

Medical historians are already familiar with medieval southern Italy through research into its famed medical school at Salerno. This volume takes a broader view of healthcare, seeking to illuminate the experience of sickness, attitudes towards the ill and infirm and the provision of care up to the twelfth century. Combining information from hagiography and chronicles with less well-known charters and archaeology, it deals with the provision of food, the environment, women's health, individual and collective disease and varieties of cure. A final chapter assesses the interaction between intellectual and practical medicine, as well as re-examining the early life of the medical school at Salerno. The book's importance lies in its wide-ranging approach and detailed analysis, which will appeal to historians of medicine and medieval culture alike. Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Preface List of Tables Abbreviations Introduction Part One Individual and Environment 1. Food and Famine 2. Individual and Environment 3. Pregnancy and Childrearing Part Two Mentalities and Healthcare 4. Sickness in the Community 5. Doctors, Hospitals and Cures 6. Recording the Dead Part Three Medical Achievement: Southern Italy in Context 7. Patterns of Knowledge: Texts and the School of Salerno Conclusions: Integrating the Southern Italian Evidence Appendices I. A miracle of St Trophimena provides a cure for Theodonanda II. Ursus the doctor on Tancred’s illegitimate birth III. Chronology of major early medieval disasters in Italy (after Corradi) IV. A survey of minimum ages at Gaeta V. Extant medical manuscripts from southern Italy Map Plates Bibliography Index The Medieval Mediterranean This wide-ranging volume combines hagiography and chronicles with less well-known charters and archaeology to illuminate the social history of medicine in southern Italy. Its detailed analysis provides new insight into the experience of sickness in the middle ages. By Patricia Skinner. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [173]-179) And Index.