Cancer and Medicine in the Middle Ages
In his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee traces the history of cancer as it has been seen in the past and continues on through the innovations in cancer treatment in the 20th century and on to the exciting research going on now and the possible future of cancer treatment. It’s a really cool book. But one of the things that struck me was his statement that cancer has always existed and has been identified since ancient times, but that other diseases generally killed people before cancer could take hold.
Mukherjee spends some time talking about cancer in the Middle Ages in his book. The observations he makes about how Medieval doctors viewed what we would later call cancer are not only fascinating, they are surprisingly advanced.
Medical knowledge in the Middle Ages, as you might imagine, was light years behind what we know now. This was before germ theory, before an understanding of contagion, and well before almost all effective surgery and anything but naturopathic medicines. (more…)
