In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer mentions that his ‘Doctour of Physick’ (possibly based on John O’Gaddesden) wasn’t entirely altruistic in his practice of medicine:
‘For gold in Physick is a
cordial
Therefore he lovede gold in
special.’
John of Gaddesden received a large fee from the Barber Sugeons’ Guild for a prescription in which the chief ingredients were three frogs. However, since John had poor as well as rich patients, he undoubtedly gave them prescriptions which they could afford. He made money through the sale of cosmetics and was, besides being a physician, a surgeon, dentist, chiropodist and de-louser.
The 18th c Dr Friend wrote of him that ‘Nothing came amiss to him. He could dissolve the stone, draw out the humour of Gout with an Ointment, conquer Epileptick fits with a necklace, and cure a Palsy with Aqua Vitae.’
While in the service of King Edward I as court physician, John attended one of the princes for smallpox, wrapping him in scarlet cloth in a bed with scarlet hangings. The red hangings were ordered so that pit-marks would not afflict the patient.
His book, Rosa Medicinae, begins with an account of fevers, and passes through diseases, remedies and injuries. Finally there are remarks on diet and cooking – ‘For hypochondriacs, quicksilver water cures pox, King’s evil, leprosy, itch, gout, rheumatism, scurvy, worms, bugs in the bed’. Hedging his bets, John made use of religion too – ‘Write the words on the jaw of the patient … In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen. Rex Pax in Christo Filio, and the pain will ease at once’. ‘When the Sunday Gospel is read, let the man sign his tooth and his head with the sign of the cross and say a paternoster and an ave for the souls of the father and mother of St Philip without stopping. It will keep the teeth from pain in the future and cure them in the present’.
‘For epilepsy roast a cuckoo until it can be powdered. Blow the powder into the patient’s nostrils and the patient will recover. He may wear a cuckoo suspended from his neck. The cuckoo will attract the epileptic material to itself, for the cuckoo has epilepsy every month.’ An alternative was a concoction of boar’s bladder, mistletoe and extract of cuckoo – possibly preferable to actually wearing the bird.
For nose bleeding, ‘In the Name of God … Wash the patient’s shirt, pouring the water nine times upon it, straining the water through it and then give the shirt to the patient.’ For the King’s evil, ‘Before being touched for it, apply snails and licquorice first’. He also gives instructions for keeping the body and the breath sweet smelling.
John relates how he cured his father: ‘I saw a stone in my father’s mouth under the tongue the length of half a little finger, which I now carry about with me and exhibit in the schools. I extracted it with a fine knife though at first I thought it was an inflammation. It was generated from milk foods of which my father was very fond, and which had congealed by the heat of his choleric temperament’.
The Rosa gives a fair picture of an English physician of the 14th century. John was a man of education, academically well-qualified and acquainted with the work of his predecessors. He was an accurate observer and had a shrewd understanding of human nature.
But, like his contemporaries, John would have been unable to find a cure – or even a palliative - for the Black Death and may indeed have died of the plague himself.
Sources:
Little Gaddesden by Vicars Bell
Little Gaddesden & Ashridge by H. Senar
R J Dixon-Smith August 2005