English medicine and surgery in the fourteenth century / by D'Arcy Power.

  • Power, D'Arcy, 1855-1941.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: English medicine and surgery in the fourteenth century / by D'Arcy Power. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Sidney Waterlow used to tell us when we were house surgeons and complained of the inadequacy of the accommodation offered us by the hospital, that when he was an apprentice he shared his bed with two others and that he slept in the middle because he was the smallest. The use of wooden bedsteads which was universal at the time made the bugcatcher an important and useful person at every hospital. The services of the Church com- pelled the constant attendance of the religious by night as well as by day, and the sick were therefore never left without supervision. The food was as good as could be obtained and seems to have been liberally supplied, whilst extras were allowed on a somewhat lavish scale. Of the food and the extras these two stories have come down to us. The first was a miracle wrought by Alfun, the builder of St. Giles, Cripplegate, whom Rahere, the founder of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital had associated with himself when he felt age creeping on. It was the manner and custom of this Alfun [says the narrator] with servants of the church to compass and go about the nigh places of the church busily to seek and provide necessaries to the need of poor men that lay in the hospital and what was committed to him truly to bring home and to sundry men as it was need to divide. And there was a certain butcher Goderyke by name, a man of great sharpness and he was a mean man, the which not only to the asker would not give but was wont with scorning words to insult them. It fell upon a certain day that Alfun went about the butchers man by man and after other when he came to this Goderyke and moved him after the apostle with good and honest words im- portunately, because he was not willing to give, and when the old man beheld that not for dread, neither for love of God nor also for shame he might not temper the hardness of that indurate heart he broke out in these words, “ O thou ungentle and unkind man 1 I beseech thee wretch put away a little and swage the hardness of that unfaithful soul and take in experience the vertue of the glorious apostle, in whom if thou trust I promise thee that every piece of thy meat that thou givest me a portion of shall the sooner be sold to other and nothing to the minishing or lessening of the price.” He, not moved with the instinct or inward stirring of charity but overcome with the importunity of the asker, drew out a piece of the vilest and cast it into his vessell calling them truants and bade them lightly go from