Blessures et chirurgie de guerre au Moyen Âge en Occident

Abstract

Wounds and wartime surgery in the West during the Middle-Ages ; The study of war wounds in the Middle Ages drawn from the accounts of the chroniclers and from chivalric novels suggests that about 50 per cent of wounds affected the head or neck, those to the limbs and the chest coming in second and third place, in about equal proportions. Medical surgery was carried out in Byzantine armies from the VIth century onwards, but the great Greek surgeons disappeared in about the XIth century. In the Latin West a lack of evidence makes it impossible to conjecture the fate of ordinary soldiers wounded in the VIth and VIIth centuries, but it seems likely that only kings and aristocrats benefited from medical care in that period. In contrast, accounts attest that from the VIIth Century the wounded men of victorious armies received medical attention on the battlefield, more often by religious personnel or civilians than by surgeons. From the XIIth Century the presence of surgeons on the battlefield became more noticeable, rank-and-file soldiers fairly regularly enjoying the benefit of their care. From the XIIIth Century the presence of surgeons and doctors with armies grew more commonplace, becoming more or less the norm during the XIVth and XVth centuries. The XIIIth and XIVth centuries were characterised by the existence of formally qualified surgeons of exceptional calibre and competence, whose disappearance is related to the Church’s prohibiting the clergy coming close to any blood. In the second half of the XIVth and XVth centuries it was thus the ‘barber-surgeons’ who carried out surgery on fighting troops ; their initial ignorance gave way in time to an undeniable practical competence and to a certain degree of theoretical knowledge that could gain them the vaunted qualification of barber-surgeon.