their practice with oral advice rather than with manual intervention, doctors deemed
themselves above surgeons, unlike in Italy; the distance was more pronounced in Paris
than at Montpellier.
Even within the craft of surgery, there was a stratification based as much on education
as on activities. In his Livre des métiers, the prévôt of Paris under Louis IX, Étienne
Boileau, distinguished between the barbier-clerc, or surgeon-barber, “of the long robe”
and the lowlier barbier-laic, or barber-surgeon, “of the short robe.” The former, who
seemed as much at ease in the royal court as downtown, claimed greater respectability on
account of their knowledge of medical theory; their ambitions gained momentum after
1295, when Lanfranc of Milan introduced academic surgery to Lyon and to Paris; and
they were recognized as a faculty by King John in 1356. Most illustrious among these
master surgeons were Henri de Mondeville and Gui de Chauliac, distinguished by their
books no less than by their care of kings and popes. A larger group was that of the
barber-surgeons, whose chief customers were merchants, sailors, and other travelers;
from 1311 on, they were allowed, after examination by four sworn masters, to provide
such health-related services as cupping and bloodletting; incorporated in Paris since
1361, in 1372 they received from King Charles V permission to extend their activities to
the treatment of “boils, tumors, and open wounds if these are not mortal.”
Documented practitioners, whatever their educational level, were naturally
concentrated at noble courts and in urban centers. Their services, less often as providers
of care to the community than as expert witnesses at trials, examiners of alleged lepers,
and inspectors of health conditions, were engaged by municipalities mainly from the 15th
century on, later than in Italy. Such services may not have received generous
compensation, and bourgeois patients were perhaps not the most profitable ones. While
doctors to notables could accumulate considerable fortunes, urban practitioners appear to
have been of modest average means. One may be surprised to learn that in Paris the
majority of them paid low taxes, and in Toulouse one-half were characterized as “poor
devils.”
Luke Demaitre
[See also: BLACK DEATH; DISEASES; HEALTH CARE; HOSPITALS;
LEPROSY; MEDICAL TEXTS; MENTAL HEALTH; SCROFULA]
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Contreni, John. “Masters and Medicine in Northern France During the Reign of Charles the Bald.”
In Charles the Bald: Court and Kingdom, ed. Margaret Gibson and Janet Nelson. Oxford:
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“The Study and Practice of Medicine in Northern France During the Reign of Charles the Bald.”
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Demaitre, Luke. “Theory and Practice in Medical Education at the University of Montpellier in the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Medicine 30 (1975):103–23.
Jacquart, Danielle. Le milieu médical en France du XIIe au XVe siècle. Geneva: Droz, 1981.
Kibre, Pearl. “The Faculty of Medicine at Paris, Charlatanism, and Unlicensed Medical Practices in
the Later Middle Ages.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 27(1953):1–20.
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