Sickness and Healing [in the Christian World, c.600–c.1100]

In early medieval Basra, a story circulated about a handsome deacon with a speech impediment. Sorcerers were blamed for his eight years’ suffering. Since the 1980s medical historians have used the metaphor of the marketplace to characterize this therapeutic pluralism. The most forceful demonstration of this qualified compatibility between medicine and religion lies in the frequency with which theologians used the physician as a ‘role model’. In no therapeutic setting was the interpenetration of medicine of the soul and that of the body so clear as in the hospital. Today’s hospital is characterized above all by technological intensity, and concentration of medical expertise on the seriously ill. The monastery of St Gall lay about 150 miles from the Bavarian court.