The Millennium Bug: Health and Medicine around the Year 1000

Abstract

.This introductory paper has two main themes: first, what can be said about the diseases characteristic of the period in question; second, what generalizations are possible about the medicine that could be deployed against them. After a preliminary discussion of the extent to which the system of dating from Christ's incarnation governed the chronology of those who fall within our scope, the paper raises the question of whether the year 1000 prompted millennial ‘fever’. This leads into an account of the concept of ‘pathocoenosis’, a tableau of the interrelated diseases prevalent at any one place and time. The limitations of the tenth- to eleventh-century evidence available for such a project are examined, philosophical objections to disease history reviewed, and agenda for future research outlined. The paper then turns to the main features of the medical texts on which any investigation of therapeutic practice in the early Middle Ages must depend: features such as amorphousness, mutability, lack of theory, elusive connection with clinical reality. Finally, some wider implications of the special issue are delineated—concerning presumed contrasts between East and West, and, with respect to the relationship of theory to practice, between early and later Middle Ages.

Anglo—Saxons, Byzantium, cemetery archaeology, early medieval medicine, hospitals, Islam, millennium, palaeopathology, pathocoenosis