Читать книгу Medicine in the Middle Ages. Extracts from "Le Moyen Age Medical" by Dr. Edmond Dupouy; translated by T. C. Minor онлайн

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This tendency of women to care for the sick now became general. “In our ancient poets and romancers,” says Roquefort, “we often notice how young girls[5] were employed to cure certain wounds, because they were more tender-hearted and gentle-handed; as, for example, Gerard de Nevers, having been wounded, was carried into a chapel, where “a beautiful maiden took him in hand to effect a cure, and he thought so much of her that in brief space of time he commenced to mend; and was so much better that he could eat and drink; and he had such confidence in the skill of the maiden that, before a month passed, he was most perfectly cured.”

As early as the sixth century, we note in the recital, Des Temps Merovingiens, by Augustin Thierry, that Queen Radegond, wife of Clotaire I., transformed her royal mansion into a hospital for indigent women. “One of the Queen’s pastimes was to go thither not simply to visit, but to perform all the most repulsive duties of nurse.”

In Feudal times it was the custom to educate the girls belonging to the nobility in practical medicine; also in surgery, especially that variety of surgery applied to wounds. This was immensely useful, inasmuch as their fathers, brothers, husbands or lovers were gallant “Knights,” who ofttimes returned from combat or tourney mutilated or crippled. It was the delicate hand of titled ladies that rendered similar service to strange foreign knights who might be brought wounded to the castle gates. This is why the knights of old rendered such devout homage to the gentler sex—knowing their kindness and love in time of distress, when bleeding wounds were to be staunched and fever allayed. In a Troubadour song, Ancassin et Nicolette, we find this passage: