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The origins of today's surgical societies are the guilds of medieval London. The Company of Barbers and the Guild of Surgeons vied for dominance no different from the scores of conflicts between rival artisans and merchants whose trades overlapped. The Company dates from 1308, when the council of London passed ordinances that installed its first master, Richard le Barber. When the surgeons received ordinances of their own in 1368, the barbers had the Council reassert theirs in 1376, 1390, 1415, and 1424. Faced with a vigorous organization with greater numbers the surgeons aligned with the physicians in 1423 to form a short-lived ruling "commonalty" with an elite membership based on educational achievement and proven ability that excluded the barbers. The surgeons were thereby granted authority over all of surgery, including that practiced by barbers, an arrangement that failed after only a year. The surgeons formed a guild in 1435 but could not compete with the barbers. The barbers' primacy became complete in 1462 when Edward IV chartered them to govern all aspects of surgery, along with the power to fine and imprison. From then barbers and surgeons amiably coexisted, likely because the rapidly growing population and the democratization of the practice of physic provided plenty of work. Henry VIII formally united the barbers and surgeons in 1540 under the Worshipful Company of Barbers and Surgeons, an amalgamation that lasted for two centuries until the surgeons broke away in 1745., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Dr Gilbert Kymer (d. 1463) was a leading royal physician, scholar, cleric and university administrator of the first half of the 15th century. He was physician to Henry V & VI, and principally to Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, for whom he wrote an extensive Dietarium. He collected medical books and facilitated their translation, and helped to set up Duke Humfrey's library at Oxford. He became Dean of Salisbury, and for 11 years was Chancellor of the University of Oxford.

Liquorice is a very ancient plant widely used in the East for millennia. It has often been employed in sweets and confectionery and also for minor ailments including cough, constipation and dyspepsia. It was probably carried to Europe by the Cluniac order of monks. Then, almost by accident, it became established in West Yorkshire at Pontefract after the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s. Abuse of liquorice is not uncommon. It can occur in the anorexia/bulimia syndrome and also in the dangerous condition of pseudoaldosteronism, which is characterised by severe hypertension and hypokalaemia and can lead to death. Liquorice remains a useful sweetener for all sorts of confectionery, including sweets and cakes (together with beer and liqueurs)., Competing Interests: No conflict of interests declared

Archaeological dental calculus has emerged as a rich source of ancient biomolecules, including proteins. Previous analyses of proteins extracted from ancient dental calculus revealed the presence of the dietary milk protein β-lactoglobulin, providing direct evidence of dairy consumption in the archaeological record. However, the potential for calculus to preserve other food-related proteins has not yet been systematically explored. Here we analyse shotgun metaproteomic data from 100 archaeological dental calculus samples ranging from the Iron Age to the post-medieval period (eighth century BC to nineteenth century AD) in England, as well as 14 dental calculus samples from contemporary dental patients and recently deceased individuals, to characterize the range and extent of dietary proteins preserved in dental calculus. In addition to milk proteins, we detect proteomic evidence of foodstuffs such as cereals and plant products, as well as the digestive enzyme salivary amylase. We discuss the importance of optimized protein extraction methods, data analysis approaches and authentication strategies in the identification of dietary proteins from archaeological dental calculus. This study demonstrates that proteomic approaches can robustly identify foodstuffs in the archaeological record that are typically under-represented due to their poor macroscopic preservation., (© 2018 The Authors.)

In late-medieval England, women's informal and gratis healthcare services helped them to accumulate and recompense social capital, which improved their families' and their own status and resources. Given the precariousness of health, special skills in the healing arts had a particular power to create a sense of gratitude and obligation. Evidence comes from the 15th-century letter collection of the Pastons, an ambitious gentry family from Norfolk. The Paston women appear both performing as healers in their kin networks and sending medical recipes and advice to their male and female relatives. Furthermore, seeking patronage at court, male relatives solicited medical secrets from the Paston women to pass along to their betters in an effort to advance their social status. This article argues that healthcare was a distinctly feminine form of participation in the Paston family's quest for social capital.

This article discusses the medicinal remedies consumed at the court of the Yorkist kings of England in the light of a lawsuit in the court of common pleas (edited in an appendix) between John Clerk, king's apothecary to Edward IV, and Katherine Neville, Duchess of Norfolk, over the partial non-payment of the apothecary's bills. It argues that the consumption of apothecaries' wares in large quantities was not merely a direct result of the excessive diet of the late medieval aristocracy, but in itself represented a facet of the conspicuous consumption inherent in the lifestyle of this particular social class. The remedies supplied by Clerk over a period of several years and listed in the legal record are set in the context of contemporary collections of medical recipes, particularly a 'dispensary' in the British Library's Harleian collection generally attributed to the king's apothecary.

This study proposes that performative rituals-that is, verbal and physical acts that reiterate prior uses-enabled medieval women and men to negotiate the dangers and difficulties of conception and childbirth. It analyzes the rituals implicated in charms, prayers, amulets, and prayer rolls and traces the circulation of such rituals within medieval English society. Manuscript records from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late Middle Ages offer evidence of the interaction of oral and written means of communicating these rituals. Certain rituals were long-lived, though variants were introduced over time that reflected changing religious attitudes and the involvement of various interested parties, including local healers, doctors, and medical practitioners, as well as monks, friars, and users of vernacular remedy books. Although many of those who recommended or provided assistance through performative rituals were males, the practices often devolved upon women themselves, and their female companions or attendants.

In 1848 the ethnologist, surgeon and Arctic explorer Richard King (1810-1876) published a three-part series on Inuit in the Journal of the Ethnological Society of London. This series provided a detailed history of Inuit from the eleventh century to the early nineteenth century. It incorporated a mixture of King's personal observations from his experience travelling to the Arctic as a member of George Back's expedition (1833-1835), and the testimonies of other contemporary and historical actors who had written on the subject. The aim was to historicise Inuit through the use of travel reports and show persistent features among the race. King was a monogenist and his sensitive recasting of Inuit was influenced by his participation in a research community actively engaged in humanitarian and abolitionist causes. The physician and ethnologist Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866) argued that King's research on Inuit was one of the best ethnological approaches to emulate and that it set the standard for the nascent discipline. If we are to take seriously Hodgkin's claim, we should look at how King constructed his depiction of Inuit. There is much to be gained by investigating the practices of nineteenth-century ethnologists because it strengthens our knowledge of the discipline's past and shows how modern understandings of races were formed., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Mandibular morphology, assessed osteometrically, is studied in two historic human skeletal series (N = 64 individuals) from northwest Europe, one from Zwolle, the Netherlands (19th century CE), the other from Wharram Percy, England (10th-19th century). Both groups show greater dental wear than modern Western populations, but the rate of wear is greater at Wharram Percy than at Zwolle, suggesting a more vigorous masticatory regime. The aim is to evaluate any differences in mandibular morphology between the two groups that might relate to the inferred difference in biomechanical loading upon the chewing apparatus consequent upon the different physical properties of the diets consumed. Results indicate that the mandibles from Zwolle are generally smaller than those from Wharram Percy, especially in the gonial and ramus region and in the height of the post-canine corpus. These differences are consistent with those predicted on biomechanical grounds. That clear differences were observed in two samples whose masticatory regimes were distinct but not very different is an indication of the sensitivity of mandibular morphology to biomechanical input, and supports its value for investigating differences in physical properties of diets in palaeopopulations., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.)

This article examines late medieval English representations of the startling and apocryphal story of Salome, the skeptical midwife who dares to touch, or at least attempt to touch, the Virgin Mary "in sexu secreto" during a postpartum examination at the nativity. Salome's story originated in the second century, but its late medieval iterations are inflected by a culture interested in evaluating and examining sensory evidence, in both medicine and religion. The story appears in sermon collections, devotional texts, the cycle nativity plays, and John Lydgate's Life of Our Lady, and these variations demonstrate the intersection of gender and experience-based knowledge in medical and devotional contexts. Salome's story provides a unique opportunity to study late medieval interpretations of female medicine, materialism, and spirituality.

From origins in their heartlands in Easter Ross, clan Munro produced no fewer than three distinct medical dynasties, all descended from Hugh Munro, 9th Baron Foulis (c1352-1425), 12th chief of the clan. This paper describes what we believe to be a unique family of related medical dynasties which were influential in Edinburgh, London and the Scottish Highlands. It sets out in detail the family genealogy, provides some biographical information, and explores the reasons for the development of such medical dynasties, which appear to be different for each of the three dynasties within this family. The 'Edinburgh Monros' included the three Alexanders Monro, primus, secundus and tertius, who between them occupied the university chair of Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh for 126 years from 1720. Dr David Monro, son of Alexander Monro tertius, emigrated to New Zealand where his descendants included several doctors, the last of whom died in 2013. The 'Bedlam Monros' achieved fame, and some notoriety, in managing mental illness in London for the 154 years from 1728-1882. In contrast, the 'Bonesetter Munros' practised their skills in the local community in Ross-shire and one of them attracted patients from all over Britain. They practised their trade for over 100 years from the start of the 19th to the early 20th century.

Alchemy in Cambridge captures the alchemical content of 56 manuscripts in Cambridge, in particular the libraries of Trinity College, Corpus Christi College and St John's College, the University Library and the Fitzwilliam Museum. As such, this catalogue makes visible a large number of previously unknown or obscured alchemica. While extant bibliographies, including those by M.R. James a century ago, were compiled by polymathic bibliographers for a wide audience of researchers, Alchemy in Cambridge benefits from the substantial developments in the history of alchemy, bibliography, and related scholarship in recent decades. Many texts are here identified for the first time. Another vital feature is the incorporation of information on alchemical illustrations in the manuscripts, intended to facilitate research on the visual culture of alchemy. The catalogue is aimed at historians of alchemy and science, and of high interest to manuscript scholars, historians of art and historians of college and university libraries.

Using educational status in England from 1170 to 2012, we show that the rate of social mobility in any society can be estimated from knowledge of just two facts: the distribution over time of surnames in the society and the distribution of surnames among an elite or underclass. Such surname measures reveal that the typical estimate of parent-child correlations in socioeconomic measures in the range of 0.2-0.6 are misleading about rates of overall social mobility. Measuring education status through Oxbridge attendance suggests a generalized intergenerational correlation in status in the range of 0.70-0.90. Social status is more strongly inherited even than height. This correlation is unchanged over centuries. Social mobility in England in 2012 was little greater than in preindustrial times. Thus there are indications of an underlying social physics surprisingly immune to government intervention.

From the 11th century up to the beginning of the 19th century a healing rite was performed by the kings of France and England. They were considered to have a hereditary divine power to cure with their hand the scrofula, a tuberculous lymphadenitis that affects mainly cervical lymph nodes. The rite took place regularly over groups of scrofulous patients and a wide audience. The belief in that miraculous power was based on the fact that kings had been annointed and crowned in a religious ceremony, thus acquiring a priestly nature together with their temporal power. The monarchs of France and England would have stimulated their subjects' credulity to strengthen their power over the feudal lords, specially when a change of dynasty took place. Scrofula may have been chosen due to a high incidence, with an evolution that may mimick healing, and also because the concept of scrofula may have included other lesions with episodes of spontaneous remission. The available historical data and the current knowledge of tuberculous lymphadenitis do not support the belief of massive miraculous healings by the king's touch.

An influential strand of English alchemy was the pursuit of the "vegetable stone," a medicinal elixir popularized by George Ripley (d. ca. 1490), made from a metallic substance, "sericon." Yet the identity of sericon was not fixed, undergoing radical reinterpretation between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries as Ripley's lead-based practice was eclipsed by new methods, notably the antimonial approach of George Starkey (1628-65). Tracing "sericonian" alchemy over 250 years, I show how alchemists fed their practical findings back into textual accounts, creating a "feedback loop" in which the authority of past adepts was maintained by exegetical manipulations--a process that I term "practical exegesis."

On 4 February 2013 experts confirmed that the remains of the last English king to die in battle were found under a council car park in Leicester, England. Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, wore the crown from 1483 until his untimely death in 1485. There have been many myths published about him, even one with a dental reference. This paper explores what dentistry was like at the time of Richard III, reveals the truth behind the myths and sees how the University of Leicester's findings about his dentition and skull has provided an insight into his identification, lifestyle and final moments.

Dental wear patterns were recorded on 458 deciduous molar teeth, of 142 subadults from late medieval (AD 1086-1539) England, to explore the relationship between dental wear and burial status of children. A new ordinal method for scoring dental wear stages on the deciduous molar teeth was devised. It was postulated that if a discernible relationship between dental wear stage and burial location could be seen then this could reflect a difference in diet between those receiving higher or lower status burial. The dental wear stages recorded were statistically similar for the dentitions of subadults from different cemeteries, as well as from different burial locations, indicating a comparable diet for the children studied., (Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Treponematosis has been one of the most studied and debated infectious diseases in paleopathology, particularly from the standpoint of its origin, evolution, and transmission. This study links evidence for treponematosis in skeletons from the 14th-16th century AD cemetery of the Augustinian friary of Hull Magistrates Court, England, with data from stable isotope analysis to test the hypothesis that the people with treponemal disease buried at this site were not locally born and raised. The objective is to explore the potential of using stable isotope data to track the place of origin and extent of mobility of individuals with an infectious disease. Dental enamel samples of 12 skeletons were selected for strontium ((87) Sr/(86) Sr ratio) and oxygen (δ(18) O) stable isotope analysis based on the presence (six - diseased) or absence (six - controls) of bone changes associated with treponemal disease. The oxygen isotope ratios of all but three individuals (1047, 1121, 823) overlapped at two standard deviations with the inferred local precipitation range, and only one individual (1216) had a strontium isotope ratio outside the regional range. Two of the four had probable/possible treponemal bone changes. Those with treponemal bone changes were not demonstrably more likely to be migrants than those without such lesions. However, because of extensive documentary evidence for trade with the Baltic Sea area, and for merchants from towns such as Stralsund, Danzig and Elbing being in Hull, it is very plausible that the four migrants came from the Baltic area or even southern Sweden., (Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

This article presents new data on mortality in the late medieval period, and suggests methodologies for analysing incomplete datasets. Using data collated from the records of Winchester College this study follows the lives of 2,692 individuals, and analyses adolescent mortality in the sample group for the period 1393-1540. This study of mortality among 10-18 year olds is the first of its kind to produce data for a sample of adolescents in late medieval England, and thereby contributes significant new data to our understanding of late medieval mortality. These data are placed within the context of that obtained for other medieval population samples, most notably with studies of medieval monastic groups.

Historians have documented rising farm sizes throughout the period 1450–1850. Existing studies have revealed much about the mechanisms underlying the development of agrarian capitalism. However, we currently lack any consensus as to when the critical developments occurred. This is largely due to the absence of sufficiently large and geographically wide-ranging datasets but is also attributable to conceptual weaknesses in much of the literature. This article develops a new approach to the problem and argues that agrarian capitalism was dominant in southern and eastern England by 1700 but that in northern England the critical developments came later.

This article grapples with the question of the corpse through two particular literary texts. Rather than an elucidation of the physiological principle of the human body by means of dissection, the play Mactatio Abel, written in England in the 15th century, stages the difficulty of the relation to the corpse, via an amplification of the biblical narrative of Abel's murder by Cain. As for Chaucer's work, The Book of the Duchess, it rewrites Ovid's and Machaut's texts featuring the figure of Morpheus in a way that distinguishes between an imitation of the living and its simulacrum in the sense Wolfgang Iser gives this concept. Chaucer's Morpheus, instead of promoting verisimilitude, forbids it. Indeed, he animates a corpse from within instead of simulating an apparition of the deceased. The simulacrum, rather than a mimetic copy of the real, blocks all representational illusion, in order to formulate absence. The readability of the corpse in both works is relational. Both literary texts express the corpse as being always already grounded in a relational and narratorial space.

The period 1471 to 1700 saw the accretion of a large corpus of alchemical works associated with the famous English alchemist George Ripley, Canon of Bridlington (d. ca. 1490). Evaluation of Ripley's alchemy is hampered by uncertainty over the composition of the corpus, the dating and provenance of individual texts, and the difficulty of separating genuine from spurious attributions. The Catalogue of the Ripley Corpus (CRC) provides a first step in ordering these diverse materials: a descriptive catalogue of approximately forty-five alchemical treatises, recipes and poems attributed to Ripley, with an index of all known manuscript copies.

In 1441, Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, was arrested, together with three associates: Margery Jourdemayne, the 'Witch of Eye', Roger Bolingbroke, Oxford cleric and astrologer, and Thomas Southwell, MB, canon of St. Stephen's, Westminster. They were accused of plotting to kill King Henry VI by necromancy, but contemporary chronicles differed on the precise nature of their crime: had they summoned demons or cast an astrological chart? This paper explores the relationship between astrology and demonic magic, focusing on feelings, rites and apparatus, and perceptions that the more the practitioner's body was implicated in the divinatory procedure, the more likely it was to be illicit.

George Ripley, Canon of Bridlington (ca. 1415 to ca. 1490) was one of England's most famous alchemists, whose alchemical opera attracted study and commentary throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were printed and translated both in England and abroad. Yet Ripley's frequently baffling texts have proved resistant to scholarly interpretation. This paper attempts to unravel some of Ripley's alchemical theories and practice, firstly by identifying his major sources, and secondly by gauging his response to these texts. For instance, although Ripley's interest in the corpus of alchemical texts pseudonymously attributed to Ramon Lull is well documented, it transpires that his best known work, the Compound of Alchemy, or Twelve Gates, is actually based not on a Lullian work, but on a Latin treatise that Ripley attributed to the little-known alchemist, Guido de Montanor. Further clues to Ripley's alchemical thought can be obtained by considering his handling of a potential conflict between his two authorities, Lull and Guido. The resulting insights into Ripley's alchemy provide an instrument for assessing which of Ripley's pseudoepigraphic works can be truly called "canonical".

The gentleman, with the help of his friends, takes responsibility for living at a high standard. Four historical examples are used to illustrate this point: Cicero, Castiglione, Lord Chesterfield, and Adam Smith. These lives span the period from the last half of the century before Christ to the last half of the eighteenth century. Gentlemen of that status are rare today, but the legacy of values, self-image, friendships, manners, and speech remain. These are especially a legacy of the professions.

The history of healthcare is complex, confusing and contested. In Walking London's medical history the story of how health services developed from medieval times to the present day is told through seven walks. The book also aims to help preserve our legacy, as increasingly former healthcare buildings are converted to other uses, and to enhance understanding of the current challenges we face in trying to improve healthcare in the 21st century. Each walk has a theme, ranging from the way hospitals merge or move and the development of primary care to how key healthcare trades became professions and the competition between the church, Crown and City for control of healthcare. While recognising the contributions of the 'great men of medicine', the book takes as much interest in the six ambulance stations built by the London County Council (1915) as the grandest teaching hospitals.

This study compares the infant mortality profiles of 128 infants from two urban and two rural cemetery sites in medieval England. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of urbanization and industrialization in terms of endogenous or exogenous causes of death. In order to undertake this analysis, two different methods of estimating gestational age from long bone lengths were used: a traditional regression method and a Bayesian method. The regression method tended to produce more marked peaks at 38 weeks, while the Bayesian method produced a broader range of ages and were more comparable with the expected "natural" mortality profiles.At all the sites, neonatal mortality (28-40 weeks) outweighed post-neonatal mortality (41-48 weeks) with rural Raunds Furnells in Northamptonshire, showing the highest number of neonatal deaths and post-medieval Spitalfields, London, showing a greater proportion of deaths due to exogenous or environmental factors. Of the four sites under study, Wharram Percy in Yorkshire showed the most convincing "natural" infant mortality profile, suggesting the inclusion of all births at the site (i.e., stillbirths and unbaptised infants)., ((c) 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.)

Maxillary sinusitis was studied as an indicator of poor air quality. Seven skeletal samples were examined from North America, England, and Nubia, and selected to represent different geographic locations, environments, and subsistence economies. Frequency rates varied from 17.2 to 51.5% of individuals affected with one or both sinuses preserved. Hardin Village had the highest frequency (51.5%), followed by the Aleuts (42.9%), "Illinois" (38.6%), Indian Knoll (38.5%), Kulubnarti (21.8%), Christchurch, Spitalfields (18.0%), and "South Dakota" (17.2%). Male frequencies ranged from 16.7 to 36.7%, but the female frequency ranged more widely from 18.0 to 76.5%. At most sites female rates exceeded male. The effect of urban and rural environment on sinusitis occurrence, and also subsistence economy, biological sex, and social status were explored, and comparative sites also considered; urban agricultural sites had a mean frequency of 48.5%, rural agricultural sites had a mean frequency of 45.0%, and hunter-gatherer sites had a mean frequency of 40.0%. In the urban sites male and female frequencies were near equal, but in the rural agricultural and hunter-gatherer sites female frequencies exceeded male frequencies. Dental disease was not found to have much impact on sinusitis frequency. The importance of the link between poor air quality and respiratory health is highlighted in clinical studies in both developed and developing countries, but also in bioarcheological studies.

During recent years, health geography has focused increasingly on how people's experiences of health and places are interrelated. This has included historical research on a variety of well-known places and remarkable events. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to how health and health care can be influential historically to the development, image and identity of 'everyday' and ordinary places. We focus on the case of a small town in Southern England to demonstrate the long and diverse historical connections that exist between health and such places. Using both historical documents and local literature, the paper reviews early invasions and incursions, epidemics of infectious disease, the development of a therapeutic seaside resort, the impacts of the Second World War, and more recent social and economic developments associated with an ageing population. Complex and diverse health-related histories are shown to be interwoven with local and extra-local histories including those of national or international significance. We argue that health histories can be integral to shaping the past and present of places and our broader understandings and interpretations of them. From a disciplinary perspective, we contend that by adopting theoretical perspectives from cultural geography, an enhanced historical geography of health could disentangle these historical strands, tell these important stories and put everyday health histories in their place.

The origins, major events and the Italian and foreign literature on the history of pediatrics are summarized. The origins of the word ''pediatrics'', the history of pediatric incunables and the first textbooks of pediatrics in Italian language are reviewed. Moreover, the foundation of the first pediatric hospital in Italy, the Italian history of academic schools in pediatrics, the first national congress and the formation of the national society of pediatrics are outlined. In 1998, on the occasion of the 100 years anniversary of the foundation of the national society of pediatrics, a special group on the history of pediatrics was formed. Finally, other topics for further studies are suggested.

English sweating disease also known as Sudor Anglicus is one of the least familiar epidemics of the Middle Ages, striking England 5 times during the 15th and 16th centuries before fading. This article will discuss the knowledge available to us about this fascinating epidemic, its characteristics and causes.