The Medieval Contribution

Abstract

This chapter explores the world of women medical practitioners in the late medieval period in various European countries. During the Middle Ages, as throughout history, women’s role was to take care of the sick. Poet, treatise writer and proto-feminist Christine de Pizan (1365–c.1430), writing at the end of the fourteenth century, attested that ‘if women possess such piety, they also possess charity, for who is it who visits and comforts the sick, helps the poor, takes care of hospitals and buries the dead? It seems to me that these are all women’s works…’¹