Claude Le´vi-Strauss, in his Structural Anthropology, studied the role of the shaman, or traditional healer, among the Kwakiutl Indians of the Vancouver region.1 He postulated what he called the “shamanistic complex” to explain the remarkable success of the shaman among his or her people. This complex consisted of the healer, the afflicted, and what he called the “social consensus.” The belief of the healer’s audience (which included the afflicted) in the success of the healing practice was more important than any other factor in determining the secure place of a particular shaman in his or her culture. Whether a particular practice “really” worked, then, was much less important than the audience’s belief that it had. A healer, Le´viStrauss concluded, “did not become a great shaman because he cured his patients he cured his patients because he had become a great shaman.”2 The work of Le´vi-Strauss and others confronts one of the most troubling aspects of the history of medicine in prescientific culture: why did people adhere to practices that modern science finds nonsensical? The anthropologist answers that this happened because of the social consensus that such practices were effective. And the social consensus of any culture must derive from the complexities of the culture itself. In any culture, the reputation of the healer is vital for these practices to flourish. Medical learning in medieval England from about 750 to about 1450 is the focus of Medicine, like poetry, required an audience to grow. This book, and the central argument concerns how this learning, understood as the medicine that was written down in texts, gained an audience among English people. The struggles of learned physicians to establish a reputation for themselves and for their medicine are an important part of this argument, as are the public character of health and disease, and the struggle of the medical practitioner to develop an audience for medical learning, especially among the elite of later medieval English culture. But as valuable as these primary sources have been, the work of other historians and social scientists has been even more useful.Įvidence from medical texts, university and church records, legal documents, and literary sources have proven rich resources for this study. The world of medieval English medical culture is complex, too complex for one historian to grasp. History is a collective enterprise, and the debt any of us owes to the labors of others cannot be ignored.
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