The two great developing professions of the Middle Ages are put under the microscope in this fascinating collection of essays edited by Wendy Turner and Sara Butler. While both law and medicine have received considerable attention from scholars in their own individual disciplines, the contributors here address the intersection between them. Legal and medical issues converge naturally through the need for investigation of the circumstances surrounding death and physical injury and on account of the implications of physical and mental impairment, the quality of medical treatment, and the training of medical practitioners. Crossing the divide between medical and legal history, the papers reveal the “complex influences of law on medicine and medicine on the law” (p. 22). They focus particularly on the regulation of medicine as a profession over time (Robison, McCleery, Dangler, Butler) and the medical or forensic expertise required in various types of legal proceedings (Nijdam, Harris-Stoertz, Kümper, Ferragud, Vitiello, Turner). Drawing on a broad range of sources, including medical treatises, licenses, statutes, penitentials, custumals, and records of inquisitions, this interdisciplinary approach enables important comparisons to be made between the theoretical and the practical. The view derived from treatises and regulations is supplemented by the perspective gained from professional medical experience and the legal records. As with most historical endeavours, meaningful comparisons are reliant to an extent on the nature of the surviving documentation and its suitability for cross-reference with other jurisdictions and practice in other European countries. The four papers examining the medical profession do so through the eyes of practitioners from four different settings – England, Italy, Spain, and Portugal – and offer contrasting views of identities, values, aspirations, concerns, and prejudices. The various regulatory frameworks and their own brushes with the law highlight the hostility between physicians and surgeons and the competitiveness, particularly with regard to reputation and status both professionally and socially.
This volume explores fresh legal historical territory for this period, with some researchers' contributions providing significant revelations, particularly in the frequently invisible role of women in the sphere of medicine. Harris-Stoertz uses the legal records to demonstrate the prominence of midwives as specialist attendants for pregnant women in the High Middle Ages (1000–1300), while Kümper's chapter is ground-breaking in confirming the importance of women (midwives/obstetrices) as medical experts in the legal forum, specifically their forensic examination for pregnancy and defilement in cases of loss of virginity and those involving children. The willingness of small towns to embrace the latest scientific advances and the expertise of the various types of medical practitioner (from barber to physician) in legal matters is brought out in Ferragud's examination of Cocentaina in Valencia. Vitiello's study similarly reveals how, even in the small Italian city of Reggio Emilia, medical professionals were required to not only inform the city authorities of potential crimes evident from suspicious injuries they were called upon to treat (as in other cities such as Venice), but also act as advisors to the courts on medical-legal matters and report the results of post-mortems (as occurred in Bologna). The Frisian compensation tariffs studied by Nijdam show how those using them needed to be aware of the legal implications of wounds and the ability to legally assess the appropriate tariff for compensation for both the wound and its treatment. Turner contends in her chapter on mentally incompetent landholders that English courts relied on the testimony of non-medical experts in matters relating to mental capacity, although the descriptions and vocabulary used by the “ordinary layman” demonstrate “a distinct awareness of medieval medical sources” (p. 13). It is not made clear, however, whether these descriptions are a reflection of literate lay understanding of medical details or were transmitted to the court by juries and officials following contact with medical practitioners (otherwise hidden from the record). There is little discussion in the volume, too, of the languages used in medical treatises (nor are they compared in this respect with legal treatises), though Nijdam's paper interestingly alludes to (but does not develop) the role of “vernacularisation” in the reception of compensation tariffs in Frisia.
The book nevertheless reveals medical professionals' attitudes towards the healing and diagnostic activities of lay people, including their anxieties about women in the medical sphere, unqualified or unlicensed charlatans, and Muslim or Jewish medical practitioners. It exemplifies the challenges posed to existing hierarchies and the legal order (including received gender roles) that arose through the employment of medical knowledge or related experience in legal situations. It also underlines the honour and status that were at stake within both the medical profession and the broader context of society.
As Butler shows, “medical men touted their relationship with God in healing” (p. 263) and the religious connections are picked up in the final two chapters which examine the hagiography of law and medicine. Trembinski considers St. Francis of Assisi's infirmities (and possibly leprosy) in the context of his life's mission and the canon law relating to prelates with disabilities. Johnson relates the causation or cure of health problems occurring in Irish saints' miracles to the exaction of honour-price and the judicial imposition of punishments on both rulers and ordinary individuals for breaching church and vernacular law.
Given the merits of this book, it is a pity that certain elements, some substantive, some purely technical, detract. The length of footnotes in several of the papers is daunting, though perhaps necessary in the case of providing the original text in full where quoted in translation. The index, however, is opaque in many respects. Lengthy, undifferentiated entries for “doctors”, “medical practitioner”, “physicians”, and “surgeons” are unhelpful, while page references within the undifferentiated category “women” do not necessarily tally with subgroups such as “midwives”, nor include women mentioned in the text by name (e.g. p. 201). There are illustrative figures and a table accompanying the text in one chapter, but it is surprising that, for such a rich iconographic subject, there are no other pictures. Moreover, in addition to points already made, when examining “professionalisation”, the book's interdisciplinary credentials would have benefitted from employing where appropriate some comparison with the various branches of the legal professions (civil, canon, and common law) and their differing/complementary experiences of education and professional regulation. Some illustration of the patients' perspective would have been beneficial, too, especially in relation to complaints made in the legal arena about practitioners' competence and medical treatment received.
The editors' introduction makes clear the book's debt to Shona Wray, whose sudden and unexpected death in 2012 robbed the world of a scholar whose “unending curiosity and bold disregard for historical boundaries prompted new ways at looking at historical questions” (p. 2). This volume is a fitting testament not only to her work, but also to this laudable attempt to probe further the relationship between law and medicine in a period of significant evolution within both disciplines and professions.
