Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W1994947434> ?p ?o ?g. }
- W1994947434 endingPage "197" @default.
- W1994947434 startingPage "177" @default.
- W1994947434 abstract "The Practice of Medicine in Piers Plowman Rosanne Gasse A reader can hardly miss the language of medical practice that occurs throughout Piers Plowman. Contrition, Faith, and Conscience are called surgeons, patient Poverty is a leche, and of course Sire Penetrans Domos arrives in Unity as the physician-surgeon whose soft plasters paralyze his patient. The poem contains manifold references to various medicinal practices and tools such as purges, salves, plasters, herbal remedies, and medicinal preparations like triacle and other drugs. Many of the poem's most basic moral aphorisms are expressed in medical terms. Mesure is medicine, advises Holy Church at B.1.35, later adding that love is triacle of hevene (1.148).1 The love of his subjects is the king's tresor . . . and tryacle at [his] nede (5.49), according to Reason. Triacle and salve are of course both pharmaceutical preparations. Yet because the metaphor of the priest as the physician of the soul is so widely disseminated in the literature of the Middle Ages, scholars have been quick to dismiss the medical language in Piers Plowman as only metaphor, without an important literal aspect.2 Overlooking the literal in this instance perpetuates, however, the common modern misperception that ancient and medieval medical theory and practice are rooted in the metaphysical and the superstitious. Samuel Bloom, for instance, hurries past the entire premodern period of medicine, summarizing it as follows: In the prevailing dualism of the body and the soul, of matter and the spirit, the body was the domain of the physician and the remainder of human experience the province of the philosopher or the priest.3 Bloom assumes the legitimacy of the dualism without question. But as Joseph Ziegler recently has argued, Ecclesiastical historians have written in terms of two separate sorts of medicine, where the superior one, medicine for the soul, was provided by the ecclesiastical agents, while the body was taken care [End Page 177] of by physicians and other medical practitioners. Medical historians have stressed the natural and religiously neutral character of the academic medicine that was developing at this period. This view is no longer satisfactory. Overlap, sometimes even ambiguity, now seems more appropriate to describe the relationship between medicine and theology, between the carers for bodies and for souls, between medical and spiritual approaches to disease.4 This essay follows Ziegler's path, examining the practice of medicine in Piers Plowman not as metaphor for something else, but as human craft. References to human acts of healing must not be restricted, as they have been, to the spiritual or metaphorical dimension in readings of the poem, but considered as evidence in their own right for what they can reveal about Langland's portrayal of medical practice and practitioners. Such a study will elucidate further our understanding of the context in which Langland wrote. Certainly, the age-old metaphor of sin as a disease is present in the text.5 Langland puns on the overlap between salve/save/salvation, medical cure/cure of souls, and doctor of medicine/doctor of theology. Through the medical metaphor he outlines the multiplicity of connections between the body politic and the human body; the body/blood of Christ and the body/soul of the Christian faithful; and the various divine, demonic, and human aspects of agency. Reason, for example, proves that thise pestilences was for pure synne (5.13), implying, as did many learned men in the fourteenth century, that it is a reasonable assumption that natural disasters like plague and destructive wind storms are divine warnings to improve human social behavior. Likewise the abstractions of Kynde, Elde, and Death, through their various physical manifestations— feveres and fluxes, Coughes and cardiacles, crampes and toothaches, Rewmes and radegundes and roynouse scalles, Biles and bocches and brennynge agues, Frenesies and foule yveles (20.81-85) —function as allies of Conscience in the battle against the forces of Antichrist. They act as blunt reminders of the failure of human flesh and therefore of the constant human need both for sacramental grace and individual spiritual commitment. Medicine is the means by which the effects of Kynde and Elde, if not Death, can be mitigated. The practitioners of medicine..." @default.
- W1994947434 created "2016-06-24" @default.
- W1994947434 creator A5080240170 @default.
- W1994947434 date "2004-01-01" @default.
- W1994947434 modified "2023-09-29" @default.
- W1994947434 title "The Practice of Medicine in Piers Plowman" @default.
- W1994947434 cites W1573772086 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W1588520875 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W1988142016 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W1990677940 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W1995889816 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2005575633 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2011991249 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2014337628 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2019819201 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2020938507 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2026679467 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2032655408 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2033063484 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2044167423 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2055165837 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2055856299 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2074625191 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2081096673 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2084570163 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2088023869 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2111492126 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2142612469 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2321893721 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2324975757 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2427736453 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2505008416 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2512202177 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2516847004 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2560208825 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2790565551 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W2796129244 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W3117188771 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W3152323523 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W564554104 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W571263230 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W637641337 @default.
- W1994947434 cites W586298298 @default.
- W1994947434 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/cr.2004.0024" @default.
- W1994947434 hasPublicationYear "2004" @default.
- W1994947434 type Work @default.
- W1994947434 sameAs 1994947434 @default.
- W1994947434 citedByCount "11" @default.
- W1994947434 countsByYear W19949474342013 @default.
- W1994947434 countsByYear W19949474342014 @default.
- W1994947434 countsByYear W19949474342016 @default.
- W1994947434 countsByYear W19949474342017 @default.
- W1994947434 countsByYear W19949474342018 @default.
- W1994947434 countsByYear W19949474342022 @default.
- W1994947434 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
- W1994947434 hasAuthorship W1994947434A5080240170 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C124952713 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C138885662 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C142362112 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C164913051 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C182744844 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C27206212 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C2778311575 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C2778692574 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C2778887610 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C2780822299 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C74916050 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C124952713 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C138885662 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C142362112 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C164913051 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C182744844 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C27206212 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C2778311575 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C2778692574 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C2778887610 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C2780822299 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C74916050 @default.
- W1994947434 hasConceptScore W1994947434C95457728 @default.
- W1994947434 hasIssue "2" @default.
- W1994947434 hasLocation W19949474341 @default.
- W1994947434 hasOpenAccess W1994947434 @default.
- W1994947434 hasPrimaryLocation W19949474341 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W1577578849 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W2006717235 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W2296584556 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W2358425720 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W2373438911 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W2605064032 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W2748952813 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W2750998898 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W3192799332 @default.
- W1994947434 hasRelatedWork W90066173 @default.
- W1994947434 hasVolume "39" @default.
- W1994947434 isParatext "false" @default.
- W1994947434 isRetracted "false" @default.
- W1994947434 magId "1994947434" @default.