‘Have done with doctors. Don’t fall into their clutches: you will get no help from them. Be satisfied with this prayer and blessing and you will be completely restored to health.’ Theodore of Sykeon’s obloquy and exhortation find numerous parallels in the social history of early Byzantine medicine. The hostility of holy men to doctors is a familiar theme. Less familiar may be that delegation of responsibility and spirit of cooperation suggested by another passage in the Life of Theodore:

The vision of a canon of Watten near St. Omer, northern France which preceded his miraculous recovery from a paralytic illness was recorded in 1091, three years after the event, by an anonymous colleague, and is appended to the Chronicle of Watten. Although the writer’s style is florid to the point of obscurity, the tale he tells is not, in outline, complex or unusual; it resembles scores of similar stories from this period. But we have in this instance the means to see the relation between the content of the vision and the writer’s interest in recording it.

The Benedictines played an important part in the development of medicine in England between 1066 and 1215. In pre-conquest England, the care of the sick had been based upon little more than the practices of Anglo-Saxon leeches which were largely founded upon superstition. Botany had become a drug list and medicine had deteriorated into little more than a collection of formulae. After the Norman conquest, chiefly through the influence of Benedictine scholars from the continent, medical learning in England began to be based upon the writings of the ancient world. These included not only the works of Galen and Hippocrates but also anonymous medical treatises in Latin such as the De Modo Medendi.

This account of Henry II’s pilgrimage to Rocamadour comes from Robert de Torigny, a well-informed contemporary, hence the significance of the details which he included. From Domfront, on the frontiers of Normandy, the king travelled hundreds of kilometres to the south.

The question posed in this paper is the extent and nature of the medical practice of the medieval waldensian brothers. What lies behind this is in part a historiographical development which gained impetus in the 1960s, principally in the works of Mollat. In these the the period of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries has been identified as crucial in several areas: a prise de conscience by many of the problems of material need, whether poverty or physical sickness or other disabilities, and the development of new ideas in some of these areas; a peaking of foundations of institutions of assistance, in particular hospitals for the sick, the outlines of which have become clear in Belgian and French work; the embodiment of the spiritual ideal of poverty in the apostolic religious movements which grew at this time. Mollat has juxtaposed these phenomena in order to suggest that one should look for interconnections between them, and it is in the spirit of his enquiry that the present question is raised. If we look at one of the two major evangelical heresies nurtured in the late twelfth cenury matrix described by Mollat, namely the movement of the waldensian brothers, shall we find an element which should be related to the wider interests and developments in assistance and, in particular, medical care which were displayed elsewhere at this time?

In this paper I would like to explore theories of disease and practices of healing in late medieval and early modern Europe, and to focus on two diseases, leprosy and plague. Much of the discussion will be based on Italian evidence since in this period, and especially in the sixteenth century, Italy was in the forefront of European medicine. Physicians were more numerous in Italy than in most European countries, and available not only in cities, but in small towns and rural communities. But disease and healing were not the exclusive concern of the medical profession. The church had not forgotten that healing had theological overtones. Equally there were the governments of the Italian states deeply committed to legislation for public health and to the control of epidemics.

Robert Burton was being as trite as Polonius when he advised his readers that the general causes of melancholy ‘are either supernatural or natural’. Apart from a small and notorious band of sceptics, all of Burton’s contemporaries agreed that mental diseases might be caused by natural accidents or supernatural forces. They attributed misery and madness to a myriad of particular misfortunes and afflictions. Sudden frights and insupportable griefs drove men mad; physical illnesses polluted their bodies and crazed their minds; horrible sins fed festering guilt and exposed them to God’s wrathful judgements; evil spirits and witches tormented them with awful temptations, suicidal desperation, stark insanity, and demonic possession. The defences against the material and immaterial enemies of human happiness were as varied as the sources of misery themselves. Mentally disturbed people were treated with drugs and therapeutic regimens to restore the balance of their humours, with religious counsel and prayer to ease their spiritual afflictions, and with amulets, charms, and exorcisms to protect them against the malignancy of demons and witches.

Eighteenth-Century Europe is remarkable for the number of medically qualified men whose fame rests not on medicine, but on their achievements in other fields. The poets Oliver Goldsmith in England and Johann Schiller in Germany come to mind, as do the author Tobias Smollett and the French political activist Jean Marat. Another is the subject of this paper, Thomas Seeker, who in later life was successively bishop of Bristol, Oxford, and archbishop of Canterbury.

Seeker’s undoubted pastoral sensitivity was reflected in his sermons and in the visitation charges which Richard Watson said deserved ‘as much attention as the best’ of those published in the eighteenth century. This, coupled with his own reticence, has tended to overshadow, if not totally eclipse, his earlier years of training as a physician, and his contribution to medicine. His biographer, Beilby Porteus, said of him ‘he chose always rather to talk of things than persons; was very sparing in giving his opinion of characters... Of his own good deeds or great attainments he never spoke, nor loved to hear others speak’.

Methodist historians have naturally tended to emphasise the reasonableness and sobriety of their founder and his followers, the social as well as the spiritual benefits they produced. The elements of irrationality and what some will see as religious hysteria in the movement have been played down. Non-methodists have been less reticent. Methodist ‘enthusiasm’ was a popular target in the eighteenth century and the charges made, however one-sided and exaggerated, had a solid basis in fact. They were to be repeated with varying degrees of distaste and disapproval by writers such as Southey; or in more balanced accounts like that of Lecky. Even the sympathetic Alexander Knox who had known Wesley personally, perceptively remarked that ‘he would have been an enthusiast if he could’. Ronald Knox suspected that the rational controls in Wesley’s mind were only superficial: he was easily swayed on supernatural phenomena ‘when the evidence supported views which he wanted to be true’. A taste for religious excitement and credulity about the supernatural were often even more marked among his followers, especially the ordinary membership.

In September 1805 bishop John Milner, Vicar Apostolic of the midland district, published an account of the Miraculous cure of Winefrid White in which he concluded that ‘This is the finger of God Exod 8:19, and that even in this age of domineering vice and incredulity, God hath not left himself without testimony Acts 14:16, or to speak in plain terms that an Evident Miracle has been wrought among us’.

Milner’s clear and public conviction about whatever happened at Holywell in the summer of 1805 leads us to enquire about the catholic tradition of miraculous cures in post-Reformation England, and about the possibility of such matters playing a part in the revival of English catholic life. The positive and concerned investigation by the local bishop also indicates something of the changing nature of episcopal duty and responsibility in the early nineteenth century. There are obviously the usual questions about truth and falsehood, physical and psychosomatic recovery, which any ‘cure’ provokes, but the case of Winefrid White is far more interesting in terms of what it tells us about the persistence and recovery of certain catholic traditions.

I know the historical sociology of religion only as an outsider; as an historian of medicine helped by that literature to a better understanding of early industrial society and perhaps to a clearer vision of what the social history of medicine ought to be. To read a recent review of the social history of religion, such as A. D. Gilbert’s Religion and Society in Industrial England, Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914, is to recognise how underdeveloped by comparison is the social history of medicine. Historians of medicine have the equivalent of church histories, of histories of theology and, of course, biographies of divines, but we lack the quantitative and comprehensive surveys of the chronological and geographical patterns in lay attendance and membership, and in professional recruitment and modes of work. For as long as medicine was generally only a transaction between an individual and his medical attendant, few statistics were produced and there is little national data. Yet there are very few local studies of how diseases were handled and how the various kinds of practitioner interacted with each other and with their various publics, so it will be some time before we shall be able to generalise on such matters.

I wonder whether we have not heard just a little too much of the secular element in functionalist theories as explanations of spiritual power at work within society. For while it is important to understand exactly how such power does its job, it does seem of equal if not far greater importance not to lose sight of its origins. Edward Thompson, for example, has presented a now often quoted summary of the virtues of the nineteenth century Catholic priest amongst the Irish poor of the ghetto. ...... ‘the only authority to whom the Irish labourers showed any deference; poorer; closer to the peasantry; literate but not far removed in class; free from identification with English employers; knowing the Gaelic, he brought news of home and .... relations and could be entrusted with remittances or messages.’ Is this why the priest held a place of honour in folk society, because he could be entrusted with anything from banking to pig keeping? Does it not seem odd that Thompson did not trouble to ask himself what the priest, a representative of everything ‘wholly other’, was doing in the slum in the first place? Had he done so I think he would have found that it was not by being spokesman for the evolutionary social services he held his power, but rather because he was, and instinctively was understood to be an objective bearer of holiness.

As the reformation took effect, claims of miraculous healing were discountenanced. So argues Keith Thomas in his fascinating book on the decline of magic in modern Europe. He argues that protestants turned to natural methods and empirical science for answers to their medical and practical needs. If he is right there may seem to be little to say about the relationship between the churches and healing in the history of the church in modern western society. Yet, as Thomas himself admits, the link had not been completely destroyed. Traditional culture proved resistant to this aspect of the reformation. It seems to me that this traditional culture was revitalised and redirected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by revivalist and heterodox protestantism and not just by secular developments. The case of the Bible Christians or Cowherdites of Salford in Lancashire may illustrate my point.

Most of the people discussed in this paper would have been amazed at being drawn into a publication chiefly concerned with ecclesiastical history. Some would undoubtedly have treated the words as a rag of very great redness. To elucidate the incongruity, I will briefly summarise who these people were, and when they lived.

The period is roughly 1850-1910; the people are those whom I define as plebeian autodidacts. By plebeian I mean, inclusively, anyone from lower-middle-class downwards. By autodidact, I mean anyone who makes their education their own affair, independently of social superiors. In the nineteenth century at least, self-education was seldom a matter of individual effort alone, but also of collective endeavour: comprising agitations for freedom of the press and of assembly, and the defence or exercise of such rights once gained; public readings, scientific demonstrations, lecture-series and, not least, marathon public debates. Thus we have to speak of a plebeian autodidact culture. It was not, of course, the culture of the majority of members of those classes I have lumped together as plebeians. Had it been, we could use the glibber word ‘popular’.

In 1886, Judge Wallis, summing up in the ‘Pimlico Case’, castigated the writings of a witness, the Catholic doctor, Thomas Low Nichols, as shocking and as tending to ‘unsex’ women. For Nichols’ Esoteric Anthropology had been found in the home of Mrs. Adelaide Bartlett, a French Catholic, accused of murdering her husband with the assistance of the Reverend George Dyson, a Wesleyan minister of Putney. Even though he had written in the preface that ‘this is no book for the centre table, the library shelf or the counter of a bookseller’, Nichols was outraged by what he considered the judge’s libel upon him and his work. In the event Mrs. Bartlett was acquitted amid the most tumultuous applause ever heard in the Old Bailey and retired to a Belgian convent. It was but one more colourful episode in the extraordinary career of the Catholic health reformer, Dr. Nichols.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a radical change in the attitude of missionary societies to medicine as an aid to evangelism. For the first fifty or sixty years of the century the talents of the medical doctor were seldom sought and, when they were, it was most often to provide protection for missionaries in areas of particular health hazard. In 1852 it was calculated that there were only thirteen European medical missionaries, and in the period 1851-70 the Church Missionary Society (CMS) recruited seven doctors out of a total of three hundred and seven new missionaries. Suitably qualified applicants were not encouraged. In 1842 the CMS informed a surgeon of their willingness to employ him as a catechist on the clear understanding that medicine ‘was only to be an occasional occupation’. James Henderson, an Edinburgh trained doctor, could find no openings as a medical missionary in 1858. In 1861 Henry Venn, the CMS secretary, told an applicant, who was contemplating medical training, that it was inadvisable to devote time to medicine or surgery because when a candidate ‘attempts to qualify himself by medical studies, it very seldom answers any good purpose’. As late as 1875, J. K. Mackenzie, MRCS (London) and LRCP (Edinburgh), applied to the London Missionary Society (LMS) and ‘was treated altogether ... as if I had come up to ask for a special favour, or a situation, at their hands’.

The history of medical missions is an epiphenomenon of the history of the medical profession. On the one hand they can be seen as a late growth in the missionary movement, and throughout the nineteenth century they required explanation and apology; on the other, they can be seen as present from the movement’s earliest days. After all, when William Carey sailed for India in 1793 his only colleague was a medical man; and a ‘surgeon’ was specifically included amongst the first party sent by the London Missionary Society to the Pacific in 1796. Indeed, generations of missionaries carried out a form of pillbox ministry, gravely administering draughts, lancing excrescences and proceeding by trial and error (‘We soon discovered the unfitness of calomel for African fevers’, observed the Rev. Hope Waddell of Calabar, ‘by its prostrating effect upon ourselves’), Some, like David Livingstone, studied medicine as part of their missionary training, without thereby becoming any special sort of missionary, or one whit less the minister of the Gospel that the ordinary missionary was assumed to be. The difference between this and the developed medical missions which were all but universal by the First World War was created less by developments in missionary thought than by developments in the medical profession.