Special Issue: The Year 1000. Medical Practice at the End of the First Millennium

Guest editors Peregrine Horden and Emilie Savage-Smith 

Historians of medicine join in the celebrations of the new millennium by looking back a thousand years. The eight essays in this collection provide a thematically and geographically coherent exploration of the medical world of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries – a period of our medical past which has received relatively little scholarly or popular attention. The focus is on the three cultures which, in differing ways, inherited the medical legacy of classical antiquity: western Christendom (especially England, France and Italy), Byzantium, and medieval Islam. Contributors emphasize practice rather than theory. Yet by examining the full range of evidence that the period has left us, they reveal not only the scale and vigour of the practice but also the often surprising extent to which practice and theory could part company.

To order the Special Issue, please follow this link to reach the Oxford University Press website

Report on the one-day symposium on ‘Medical Practice around the Year 1000’, held at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford, November 2000.

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