Abstract
John of Arderne, in an early fifteenth-century English translation, implored medical practitioners to charge as much as possible: ‘euer be he warre of scarse askyngis’, he argued, ‘ffor ouer scarse askyngis settep at not both pe markette and the thing’.1 The accounts that introduced the ‘medical marketplace’ to the history of medicine contrasted the new capitalist structures of early modern Europe with the ‘traditional’ healing of the Middle Ages. Subsequently, scholars have diverged over whether to extend the notion into this earlier period.2 How far can we read Arderne’s comments as reflecting a market in medieval medicine? This chapter sets out to reassess this contested territory: to look at the ‘medical economies’ of fifteenth-century England, the systems of social encounter and exchange within which responses to illness were sought and provided, and compare them against the influential models of Harold Cook and Katharine Park.
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Notes
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Roger French does: R. French, Medicine Before Science (Cambridge, 2003); others do not (see below).
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Surgery as well as physic. See D. W. Amundsen, ‘Medieval Canon Law on Medical and Surgical Practice by the Clergy’, BHM, 52 (1978); R. Ralley, ‘The Clerical Physician in Late Medieval England’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005).
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and ODNB. Medical practitioners often provided astrological services for patrons: see H. M. Carey, Courting Disaster (1992).
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For comparison, late in the fourteenth century the mercers’ and drapers’ guilds each charged 20s. for entry. G. Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (1908), 122.
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Ralley, R. (2007). Medical Economies in Fifteenth-Century England. In: Jenner, M.S.R., Wallis, P. (eds) Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591462_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591462_2
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