'We live in an age where illness and deformity are commonplace'

The Year of the Plague #5

Part One: The Worst Year Ever
Part Two: Rats
Part Three: Rome’s Miserable Fate
Part Four: Crop rotation in the 14th century

At the Siege of Algeciras the Christian Castilians finally broke the back of Muslim Spain, although Granada hung on for another century and a half before the Moors of Al-Andalus had their last sigh. The siege, which ended in 1344 after two years, saw cannon used in Europe for possibly the first time, marking the transition to a new form of military technology which would eventually end the medieval system.

Among those present was an Englishman by the name of John Arderne, raised in Nottinghamshire and later a student at the medical school at Montpellier, then the epicentre of western medicine. War is obviously hell, but it is useful for surgeons to learn about the workings of the human body, and it was through this that a lot of medical knowledge was advanced. Medical men studying anatomy needed corpses and that was one thing the medieval period was certainly not short of. Arderne saw fighting in France and Spain and would become one of the first noted physicians of medieval Europe.

Medicine was by modern standards primitive, but then medicine didn’t begin to seriously improve until the 19^th century. The Greeks and Romans had many interesting theories about how the human body worked but they were unfortunately all completely wrong. The Arabs were more advanced, but again in the face of a virulent disease all they could really do was give the patient some opium and pray for the best. Almost none of the maladies at the time were treatable, and there were a whole variety of disgusting and grotesque illnesses to choose from.