Over the past two decades, Tony Hunt has edited nearly half the corpus of the Anglo-Norman medical texts and recipe collections surveyed by Ruth Dean in 1999. Although the recipes – whose sources are inherently difficult to trace no matter what language they are written in – represent a diverse array of learned and ‘popular’ origins, Hunt's detailed researches make clear that all of the major texts he edited were direct translations of Latin works. As a medical historian specializing in Latin medical literature, I can confirm from the broader Western European perspective the now common view that Anglo-Norman was ‘precocious’. Aside from a collection of Hebrew medical translations (all, apparently, the work of a single translator working in southern France between 1197 and 1199) and an apparently isolated translation of Roger Frugardi's Chirurgia (Surgery) into Occitan in 1209, the Anglo-Norman works appear to be the earliest vernacular medical writings since the translations into Anglo-Saxon in the tenth and eleventh centuries, themselves a unique phenomenon. Although the Old French medical corpus has yet to be adequately surveyed, at the moment no other vernacular tradition would seem to match the amount of material available in Anglo-Norman until the fourteenth century. Both the Anglo-Saxon and the Anglo-Norman corpora, moreover, share a central characteristic: they make a fundamentally Mediterranean system of medicine accessible to readers (and auditors) in the north.