First Name:
Katherine
Last Name:
Bakewell
Major Department:
Biology
Thesis Director:
Lisa Holliday
Date of Thesis:
May 2011
This work takes place during the Third Crusade to the Holy Land and is told from the point of view of a medieval surgeon following the army of Richard the Lionhearted from a small English village to Jerusalem, and along the way describes the medicine of medieval times and what Crusade warfare was like. The arguments in The Diary of Geoffrey, a Crusade surgeon, counters the common conception that Anglo-Saxon medicine was full of flaws and superstitions by saying that the medical traditions of all other countries were similarly flawed, in using divination and prayer. War was a school for surgeons, and allowed them to learn about anatomy since the Church forbade widespread dissection of humans. The war also increased the differences in between university trained physicus and practical surgeons, while university- trained medicine became more and more theoretical and impractical while surgery made advances from working with the human body. The separation was very distinct by the time of the Third Crusade, and only exacerbated by warfare as surgery developed new techniques and the academic physicians distanced themselves from patients. Further , this work shows that while the Third Crusade was a debacle militarily, European medicine benefited from the cultural exchange ofideas with the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The narrator and aMuslim doctor act as the mouthpieces for a dialogue about the differences and surprising similarities in Eurpoean and Ottoman medicine in the twelfth century. In short, the book is intended to interest young people, and really anyone, in medical practices of the medieval period and the ways in which they changed during warfare.