Medicine in the Archives: Resources for Researching Medical History Topics

~ lthOUgh excellent work has been produ.ced in medieval medical history for well over a century, it has only been in the past twenty years or so that the field has reached a critical mass of scholarship that combines the necessary groundwork of philology with the interpretative work that makes the sometimes esoteric; concerns of medical theory or the structures of medical practice come alive for the average reader. Broadly speaking, medical history as it is currently practiced addresses three major questions: (1) the history of medical ideas, which usually involves examination of medical texts; (2) the history of medical practices and practitioners, which can be researched both through medical texts and a variety of other sources; and (3) broader cultural-historical questions . about how ideas about the physical body, whether in health or disease, interacted with other ideas or practices, be they