A weak man needs a physician.

Before examining Anglo-Saxon medical literature in more detail, we should look at the physician and his patients. Unfortunately, we are told almost nothing about them. A little can be inferred from incidental references to physicians in various texts, but nowhere is one described nor his status made clear.

A few illustrations in illuminated manuscripts depict physicians at work. Most of them are shown in classical dress. But there are a couple showing physicians in native dress and untonsured, implying that they were not members of an ecclesiastical order. If laymen were physicians, they must have been reasonably well educated, as surviving medical documents draw generously on Latin medical texts and give ample evidence that they were intended to be manuals for practising physicians and that they were so used. Perhaps it was because lay physicians could not be expected to be proficient in Latin that there was so much translation from Latin medical works into English. But there is equally good evidence that physicians were members of religious orders. For example, in many charm remedies the operator is told simply to sing so many psalms or litanies over the medicine and the patient, which could be done much more expertly by a cleric than by a layman. In other charms masses are to be sung over the ingredients of a medicine, which could be done only by a priest.