Juliana Cummings, Medicine in the Middle Ages: Surviving the Times, Yorkshire and Philadelphia: Pen & Sword Books, 2021, 197 pp., 16 pp. insert of b/w prints on glossy paper.

Abstract

Abstract This account of late medieval medicine is unusual in being the first non-fiction book by the author of several historical novels set in the period, most recently of “a historical romance of Vlad the Impaler” (2020). Juliana Cummings has a long-standing fascination with her family’s history back to the time of Henry VII of England (1457–1509), when male ancestors fought in the king’s army, and with the medical perils people faced even in times of relative peace and prosperity. Responding to her treatment of medicine and mortality in novels and short stories, an editor from Pen & Sword History reached out to Cummings and suggested she write this book. The aim is to instruct those who know little about medicine before the present day and to do so in a read­able fashion, with reliable background information about the development of medical knowledge since Greco-Roman times. Obviously, this is not a book for specialists, but a good gift for friends and relatives, especially younger ones who wonder what things were like in earlier times and how people managed to live through them. Hence the book’s subtitle, “Surviving the Times.”