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- [00:00]
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Dr. Catherine Harvey
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Catherine Harvey
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Dr. Catherine Harvey
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- [01:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Catherine Harvey about her book titled the Medieval Guide to Healthy Living, published by reaction in 2026. Now, there's a whole bunch of reasons why if we want to be healthy by today's standards, we we would not want to go back in time to the medieval period, for instance, in England. But although there are all sorts of health concerns those many centuries ago, it turns out there were actually some pretty clear ideas about what it was to be healthy at that point. And some of those ideas are actually pretty straightforward or at least make sense to us today. Right. Ideas about exercise, about diet, even about mental health we're probably going to discuss. And yes, there are also some ideas that are really strange by today's standards too. So clearly lots of things for us to get into. Katherine, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Catherine Harvey
Thanks for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Catherine Harvey
Yeah, so I'm a medieval historian and I suppose I've been interested in sort of medieval medicine, medieval bodies for quite a long time. Like a lot of people about my age in the uk, I did the Schools History project GCSE where we did a little unit on medicine through time. Then when I went to university I did a second year module on medieval medicine. Then I got a bit distracted. I did a PhD on medieval Episcopal appointments and elections, which has got nothing to do with bodies really. But then I started doing a postdoc on medieval episcopal bodies and so I was looking specifically at bishops bodies, but I very much started thinking about how medieval people thought bodies worked and what they could do to keep themselves healthy. And I got particularly interested, slightly surprisingly, for somebody working on medieval church, when you might have thought in sexual health, because I came across this little clutch of stories about medieval bishops who were supposed to die of celibacy, supposedly died of celibacy. And I got really interested in that. And that grew into my last book, which was called the Fires of Lust, which was about sex of the middle, sex in the Middle Ages. And health was obviously an important part of that. What they thought about sex in terms of what was good for you, what wasn't, whether you could get vd, all that sort of thing. And I suppose when I'd written that one and I was thinking about what I could do next, I thought, I think there's something here to look at about health more generally and how medieval people try to stay healthy. And I suppose, like a lot of people, I'm quite interested in sort of healthy living and what we can do to keep healthy, exercise and the like. And so it was something that very tied, very much tied in with both my historical and personal interests. And. Yeah, so the Medieval Guide to Healthy Living was born.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I think it is exactly that combination of interest in terms of what we think and can do today, as well as historical interest that I want to sort of focus the first part of our conversation on. So I want to ask you about a whole bunch of areas in the Medieval Guide to Healthy Living that actually might seem more relevant today than we might expect. But then I think we will probably cover some of the things that seem quite strange. So thinking today, for instance, when one goes to a doctor's office, right, a lot of times we hear advice around, well, before we get to a problem, we want to try and prevent a problem. Right. So was preventative medicine important for medieval people too?
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Dr. Catherine Harvey
Yeah, I think it was really important, which I think is maybe quite surprising to us because we tend to think of medieval medicine just being terrible and useless. And actually, no, they were really keen on the idea that, as you say, prevention is better than a cure. And so medieval medical texts are full of information about what you can do to stay healthy. They're very interested in a set of factors called the non naturals, which are six factors, their air and environment, food and drink, movement and rest, sleep, excretion and the emotions. And they very much think that if you can control those factors, if you can manage those things, that vastly improves your chances of staying healthy. And so very much, I think medieval people expected to get preventative advice from their doctors if they were wealthy enough to have a personal physician or to see a doctor sometimes. And people were very interested in what they could do for themselves to keep themselves healthy. And I think that's partly because, like us, largely because, like us, they wanted to be healthy, they wanted to live longer, healthier lives. But I think, surprisingly, actually, the whole Christian context also feeds into this increasingly, because although we think about sort of medicine versus religion, certainly in the context of the Middle Ages, we'd assume actually they were increasingly interested in the idea that your body is God's creation. And as Christians, you're supposed to have a duty to look after God's creation. And that included looking after your body, trying to keep yourself healthy. So there was this whole interaction between medical ideas and religious ideas that was very much encouraging people towards the end of the Middle Ages to think about what they could do to keep themselves healthy. And I mean, I think, of course the other big factor in this is that medieval medicine wasn't very good. There were some things they were very good at, some things they could do very well, but there were a lot of things they couldn't treat and they were aware of that and they wanted, if they could, to avoid those nasty treatments and to avoid an illness that couldn't be cured. And so preventative medicine was really important for that. And that became even more so, I think, in times of crisis. So particularly during the Black Death, there are lots and lots of regimens, then the regimens, the texts about how to be healthy. But then you get special plague regimens that tell people what they can do to avoid the plague, how healthy living can help you avoid catching the plague. So, yeah, it's something they are really
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
interested in that is definitely quite interesting given our perceptions, I think often of this period, given then that interest, how did everyday people who wanted to learn about kind of what they should and shouldn't do, how did they learn about what sorts of practices might make for more healthy living?
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Dr. Catherine Harvey
So, I mean, even more so then than today. Obviously the really specialist medical knowledge is very much confined to the universities, the monasteries and people like, you know, court physicians who are very well trained and very experienced. And so we certainly shouldn't imagine sort of ordinary people in the Middle Ages reading something like Annabiced as Canon of Medicine, which is one of the really influential texts. But I think there is far more trickle down than we might expect. And so those ideas that are circulating in Those really elite specialist contexts. Actually, if we look at more ordinary medical practitioners who haven't been to university, who've been learned on the job, in a lot of cases, they've actually got surprisingly similar ideas and they use surprisingly similar treatments. So there's a really interesting chap called John Crophill who. He's a bailiff in Essex. I think he works for a convent in the 15th century. But he's got a sort of side hustle as a medical practitioner and we know about this because he's. It's a sort of commonplace book, survives and he copied extracts from various medical texts into that book and he also kept records of his own medical practice. And what that shows us is that he was very au fait with a lot of the core ideas. You know, the idea of the humors, the idea that you need to keep them in balance to stay healthy. And that his treatments, he was. One of the things he did a lot of was diagnosing people using uroscopy, examining their urine. There's a list in his book of the people he'd examined their urine and it's really quite ordinary people, shepherds and the like. And so, yeah, what we can see from there is that even quite low status practitioners in Kwai's rural, what we might think of as rural backwaters actually have a decent level of knowledge and presumably some of that would have spread out further from there. Something else that happens a lot that. That I think is quite surprising to people is actually the church is quite important in disseminating medical knowledge. And that's because partly because they think it's quite important for the priests to have a basic medical knowledge to do their job properly. So one of the things they're quite interested in is that if as a priest you're hearing confession, then it's good for you to understand the humours and people's individual humor or makeup so that you can understand their susceptibility to particular sins. So, for example, if you're a naturally very hot person, you'll be more prone to lust. But also the penances that it's appropriate to prescribe because somebody with a particular delicate complexion might not be able to cope with, say, lots of fasting, which was a common penance. And churchmen are also really keen on sort of using medical analogies in their sermons and the like. So one that they're very keen on is they often compare confession to vomiting in that both sort of get bad things out and leave you healthier in the long run. So Yeah, I think the Church is actually spreading medical knowledge. And also, obviously, increasingly towards the end of the Middle Ages, as literacy is improving and as books are becoming more available, more and more people are able to read about this stuff for themselves. I mean, certainly not the majority of the population. We shouldn't imagine your average 15th century peasant, you know, reading a big book on medieval medicine. But say artisans in London, increasingly illiterate, have access to books. And we know from some of their, you know, the surviving books that the books that have survived, we know what was in people's collections, we know what they read, what they copied out into their commonplace books. And we know people were increasingly interested in health, particularly these regimens, and in learning what they could do to keep themselves healthy.
- [11:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is interesting. As you said, it's definitely not just the elite, which is always helpful to understand in the medieval period. What sorts of things then did this all kind of come to? Right, you've established that medieval people were interested in what they can do to be healthy and that they had multiple sort of sources of getting that information. What were the conclusions they came to in terms of what a healthy environment for living or leisure or work was meant to be understood as?
- [11:59]
Dr. Catherine Harvey
So, yeah, air and environment is one of these six non naturals. And so the surroundings in which you live, they think are really important in terms of making you healthy or making you ill, which, let's face it, is true. And so that reflects is reflected in a preoccupation with air. They think that the air that you breathe is really important. And so there are certain locations that have particularly good healthy air, mountain air they think is particularly healthy. But they're worried about bad air making you ill. And so, for example, if the prevailing wind to your house is over a marsh, they'll be worried about that because they're very concerned about sort of stagnant waters as a source of disease. They're very concerned about any sort of confined air. So, yeah, it's important that your house is very well ventilated. We're very concerned about keeping houses clean, keeping houses away from and making sure that you don't have in your house sort of bad smells. So things like if you're wealthy enough to have a toilet in your house, you should think carefully about where that's located so that it doesn't spread bad smells around the house. A lot of people keep pigs in the Middle Ages, but they're very concerned about where they're kept so that they don't make your house and other people's houses smell. They're very keen on gardens. Gardens as a place to relax, obviously, but also as something that can bring health benefits. So, for example, they're very interested. They think grass is great because grass is green and green is a refreshing color. And it could, by looking at grass, that can help to sharpen your vision and potentially even in the long run, helps ward off problems like blindness. So that's something that's really important to them, but also your surroundings more broadly. So I think, you know, one of the big stereotypes of the Middle Ages is that everywhere was filthy. And I think that's really unfair. I think they were really concerned about dirt because they thought it caused disease. And so as we go through the later Middle Ages, we see more and more attempts on the part of the authorities to keep towns clean. And some of that's done by sort of providing infrastructure, so providing clean water supplies and drainage systems to get rid of waste by making sure that waste is disposed of properly, both domestic waste and trade waste, so that it doesn't contaminate water supplies, so that it doesn't build up in the streets. And there are lots of rules about what you can dump and where. And so they're particularly concerned, for example, about butcher's waste. And people get really upset in the Middle Ages if a butcher keeps dumping his offal in a ditch or something by their house. They'll complain to the authorities and the authorities will do something about it. So, yeah, it's really important that you're living in a healthy environment and that it does extend to thinking about people's work environments. They're not terribly good at health and safety, but they are aware that sort of working with certain materials can make you vulnerable to certain conditions. And they do attempt to make sure that things like industrial waste is dealt with properly and that industries that produce a lot of bad smells, like tanning, for example, are confined to a particular quarter of the town so that the whole place doesn't stink.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is more kind of concerned about the environment than perhaps we would have expected. Of course, though, another important element to being healthy is what's around you, but also what you put inside. So what was considered to be a healthy diet.
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Dr. Catherine Harvey
Yeah. So obviously, like us, they think that food is really important. And often, if you read one of these medieval regimens, actually the vast majority of it will be taken up with food and how this works. They've got very different ideas about food to ours because whereas we thought we talk in terms of proteins and fats and carbohydrates and stuff. They thought about food in humoral terms. So they're thinking about food as being hot or cold or wet or dry and affecting your body in that way. And that means that some of their ideas about food seem quite odd to us. So, for example, they're quite worried about fresh fruit, things like apples and pears that we would now consider to be quite a healthy snack. They thought, well, they're cold, they're moist, you probably shouldn't eat too many of them if you were eating them, they were better cooked, that was the safest way to eat them. And fish, I mean, fish, I think, is probably something, though, that we tend to think of as a healthier option. They thought fish was really quite dangerous because it's cold and it's wet and it produces lots of phlegm. And so if you eat lots of fish, it may well make you ill. That doesn't mean that people didn't eat these things. We know very much that they did, but it was a potential risk. And they did think that if you. Yeah. Insisted on eating fruit, well, cook it if you want to eat fish. And they ate a lot of fish for religious reasons, if nothing else, apart from the fact that people liked it as well. But you could try and mitigate some of the risks by using a cooking method that would sort of balance out those qualities. So fish, for example, you might fry. It would be better to fry fish rather than boiling it, and you might use sauces to sort of counterbalance those qualities. So that was something you could do to sort of count towards a healthy diet. They had a lot of sources in the Middle Ages, but I think one of the other things that is surprising to us is how much what you should eat was tailored towards the individual, at least in theory, because, you know, whereas today we'd go, broadly speaking, we all need roughly the same in terms of types of food. They thought that what you needed was dependent on your individual complexion. So if, for example, you were already quite a cold person, you shouldn't be eating more cold foods are making yourself even colder. They thought that the food of your native place was very definitely the best for you. So whereas now we tend to think it's good to be adventurous in terms of food, they thought you needed to be a bit more careful about that and that if you went abroad, one of the things that might make you ill was eating strange food. Not as well now we'd think of it, maybe in terms of you've got food poisoning, but in terms of you're eating Stuff that your body's not used to coping with. But probably the biggest surprise to us is how much social status was tied into it. So they very much had this idea that peasants have coarse digestions. They can manage sort of coarse foods, things like, you know, rough, gritty bread, beef. Beef was very much thought of as a cheap and nasty meat for much of the Middle Ages. And those sorts of coarse foods produce lots of superfluities which could make you ill. But that's okay, because if you're a peasant, your system can deal with those and you'll do lots of physical labour. So you'll sweat a lot and you'll sweat out all those superfluities. Whereas the wealthy, who have got more delicate digestions anyway and tend to live more sedentary lives, need delicate foods for their delicate digestions. So often very rich people eat a bit like invalids. They eat a lot of chicken, which was thought to be very delicate meat. They drink wine, which by medieval standards is pretty much the healthiest drink you can get. So, yeah, sort of medical theory justifying conspicuous consumption by the wealthy and the sometimes unpleasant foods that the poor had to put up with. Because obviously one of the problems here is that for all this knowledge about what you should be eating and drinking, obviously a lot of people at this point were living at subsistence level and. And so a lot of peasants are eating a lot of bread, a lot of pottage vegetables, a lot of the calories are coming from ale and they're only getting to eat these nicer things very rarely, if at all, when the supply is there for them. So it's, yeah, quite different to today.
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Dr. Catherine Harvey
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Convenient how those justifications about who gets to have nice things go together. So that's definitely interesting. What about exercise? Was that seen to be related to health? Obviously there's some class elements even in just what you've mentioned in terms of sedentary or not. So is exercise of any kind sort of part of this conception?
- [23:06]
Dr. Catherine Harvey
Definitely. They're very keen on the idea that it's good to move your body about and that exercise is something that sort of makes you breathe more deeply, that it warms the body and sort of moves you around and so tones your body is A good thing. And people are very much encouraged to exercise. One of the odd things to us is that one of the things they thought it had to be to really count as exercise was it had to be something you'd done by choice. So actually, if you're a peasant working in the fields all day, or a fryer going on a long walk, because that's what friars do when they're walking from place to place, they were a bit suspect about that. They didn't really think that was proper exercise. It has to be, really to something that you're doing by choice. But a lot of the forms of exercise that they thought were good were very similar to what we still do today. They thought that walking was by far the best form of exercise, suitable for practically everybody, exercises the whole body. So, yeah, walking, a really good form of exercise. But they do all sorts of other things too. You know, there's lots of ball games, obviously, particularly the wealthy do a lot of riding, a lot of hunting. Some people seem to swim, but not as many people as today could swim. And they're very keen on exercise that gets you outdoors. They definitely think that's the best form of exercise, largely, it seems, because then you get fresh air as well, and because they think it's good for you mentally as well. You know, you get outside, you see pleasant things, you smell the flowers, see a nice view, whatever, and they sort of understand that. So then exercise is boosting both your physical and your mental health. Obviously, it wasn't always practical to exercise outdoors, for all sorts of reasons. There's a chap called Peter Figarola, who is a physician, who in the early 14th century writes a little regimen for his sons when they go off to university. And he says in this little letter to them that they should try to go for a walk or maybe even a run every morning and evening. But if the weather's too nasty, if they can't do that, they should exercise at home. And he's envisaging things like flinging a big stick around or walking up and down the stairs. I pity their poor neighbours. But, yeah, the idea that you could do exercise indoors is there. And actually that's particularly important for people, the clergy, for example, where it might be a bit undignified for them to do certain exercises in public. You certainly wouldn't expect your parish priest to be playing football or something. And so there are actually texts that suggest, well, if you're a priest, maybe you should exercise indoors. So maybe you should do things like get yourself some big stones and lift them, or have a rope attached to the ceiling in your hall, in your main room, in your house, and then you can climb up it. It's almost like going to the gym, isn't it? I mean, I think what is surprising to us about exercise in the Middle Ages is that it's defined quite broadly. So it's about moving fluids around the body and it's about breathing more deeply. And therefore they include, as exercise some things that we definitely wouldn't. So, for example, having a massage or going on a boat or rocking a baby in a cradle, those are all things that are sometimes counted in this same category as movement for health. And on the deep breathing thing, things like singing, they sometimes mentioned. That's one of the things that Peter Fagarola suggests that his sons can do on a rainy day. They can stay indoors and single and that will be good for them. But definitely, yeah, exercise is very important as a way of keeping healthy in the Middle Ages. Yeah.
- [26:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And an interesting range there of options available. And also interesting that some of the reasons exercise was seen to be beneficial was for mental health as well. So how did medieval people think about mental and emotional health?
- [27:05]
Dr. Catherine Harvey
Yeah, I think the thing that probably surprises a lot of people is that they thought about it at all, because we have got the tendency now to talk as if mental health is something we've discussed, discovered quite recently, and that people in the past weren't really interested in it. And actually, when you start reading medieval texts, I think it quite quickly becomes clear that actually they struggled with a lot of the same problems and were worried about the same things as us. So people talk a lot about their jobs stressing them out. Some of the jobs they think are stressful are ones that we would now assume are relatively cushy ones in the Middle Ages. So there's a lot of worry about sort of nobles. You know, it's really stressful to have that big household and to obviously, all those estates and be responsible for all those people. Monks talk a lot about being stressed. There's one particularly good letter by a monk at Revo in Yorkshire who. He complains that sort of the weight of his responsibilities is making him ill. He tells his friend about all these physical symptoms he's having because of the stress of his job, and he's convinced that that if he isn't allowed to give up this position soon, he's going to die of stress, basically. So, yeah, they very much worry about that. They worry about the fact that if you're worried it will keep you awake at night. And insomnia are obviously as bad for you. They worry about people who get angry too often because anger is an emotion that very much heats and dries out the body, and so that's bad for you. So if you're somebody who gets angry a lot, that's got the potential to shorten your life. They even worry about memory loss as you get older and how you can keep your mind active in old age. And so old people are encouraged to, you know, very much carry on engaging with the world, reading, even doing maths problems. One regimen suggests, which feels a bit like going, yeah, Granny, do the Sudoku. That'll keep your mind active, which we've still got a tendency to do today, haven't we? So, yeah, that's really important. And broadly speaking, the idea is that negative emotions will dry out the body and shorten your life, but positive emotions, being happy moistens the body and will make you healthier. And so there's quite a lot in these preventative texts, in these regimens, and doctors talk about people needing to do things that give them pleasure. And a lot of those are things that we still would encourage people to do for the sake of their mental health. Things like sa, seeing your friends, reading a good book, listening to some music you enjoy, getting outside and going for a walk are overall things that doctors will very much prescribe to people who are struggling with their mental health. And they're also very interested in the idea that sort of, if you can, emotions, again, it becomes very relevant during the Black Death is the time they talk a lot about emotions because they're very worried that if people get really frightened, that makes them more susceptible to illness. And so there's a lot of concern that, you know, if too many people dressed in mourning garb, if people keep hearing funeral pearls, that will make them more susceptible to plague. So during the times of plague, sometimes those things are banned so that they don't frighten people too much. And people are encouraged to try and keep themselves positive, as hard as that it must have been when, you know, half the world was dying around you. It's very much seen as something you can do to protect yourself.
- [30:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to see, kind of how many of those suggestions are so similar between now and then. What about another aspect of, I suppose, kind of everyday life? Obviously, plagues aside for a moment, everyone gets old, or at least everyone hopes to get old. How are things like aging and old age approached in this context?
- [30:47]
Dr. Catherine Harvey
So I think in a lot of ways, you know, their attitude to aging was quite similar to ours. Nobody really wants to, but it's better than the alternative. Certainly there were old people in the Middle Ages. You know, I think it's a common misconception that everybody died young. And although their life expectancy was on average shorter than ours, it's really heavily skewed by infant mortality. But once you make it past five, your chances of living to a decent age have vastly increased. If you make it to adulthood even more. So there are quite a few people around, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s in the middle Ages. There is some really good documentation for early 15th century Italian cities about the demography of those towns that have allowed people to work out that it's around 15% of the population in some towns in early modern, in early 15th century Italy were over 60, which I think is quite a lot higher than we might think it was. So there's very much this preoccupation with healthy living as something that will help you to live to that age. And healthy living is something that can improve your old age. So I mean, I think much as today, some people seem to quite enjoy getting old and very much see themselves as old. There's a letter from the printer William Caxton that sticks in my mind who when he was about 50, he's writing about how he's slowing down now he's getting old, he's very much talking himself as an old man and he goes on to live for another 20 odd years. He can't have been that frail at that point. Whereas somebody like the poet Petrarch is very insistent that, well, he's no, he's not that old, he's going to keep going, he's going to carry on writing his books. It's doing things that make his work life worth living. And that was very much what older people were encouraged to do by the regimens. You might need to take it a bit more easily. You might not be able to go out and play football now, you might be better to go for a walk, but that you should keep yourself active. And that was the best way not only to live longer, but to have a better quality of life in old age. The other thing that definitely we see is in the same way, you know, now there are all these longevity gurus and these tech pros trying to work out how they're going to live forever. And people were interested in that sort of stuff even in the Middle Ages. So there's one school of thought that thinks, well, maybe sort of an infusion of young blood or young bodily fluids will help rejuvenate an old body. So sometimes you get people who drink blood or drink breast milk and they hope that will give them some of the heat and moisture of a younger body and keep them going. And they also get very interested in gold because gold was thought to be the perfect element. You know, it's perfectly balanced. And so people, wealthy people obviously get quite into, well, what would happen if we eat or drink gold. They seem to have become particularly obsessed by that. At the papal curia in the later Middle Ages, a lot of the cardinals were very into it. And in the late 13th century, Pope John XXI was apparently quite keen on going around telling people that he'd worked out how he was going to live to be a really good old age. And then unfortunately a ceiling fell on him when he wasn't that old and he died. But definitely the desire to live to a good old age is very much there. And people who have relatives who do live to be very old are often very proud of them in the same way as we are and talk about their grandpa who got to be 100 and something. And they seem to see that as a good sign for them.
- [34:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that sounds very familiar indeed. What about thinking about kind of the population more broadly? Right. So we've mentioned sort of aging a little bit about mental health. What about medicine or medical thinking for people who weren't sort of the assumed norm? Right. Obviously today in medicine we still have biases that assume that the norm is an able bodied adult man. What did medicine and medical thinking think then? Was that the same norm? Were there other ideas? Was that norm broader? I mean, what was that like?
- [35:00]
Dr. Catherine Harvey
Absolutely, that norm was there and I think, as it still does today, it did cause problems for people who weren't able bodied adult men. But I mean, there are some quite sensible writings about other groups of people. We've talked a bit about regimens for the elderly. There is writing about women's health. And so there are, for example, recipes to deal with period pain or if your periods have stopped and you're trying to get them started again. There are recipes for that sort of thing. There are regimens for pregnant women. There's a particularly good one by a chap called Michael Savonarola who was writing, he was a doctor in 15th century Italy. And although, I mean, he does talk a lot about sort of religion and there's quite a disturbing bit in there where he talks about, basically you have to really look after yourself when you're pregnant, because if you don't and you have A miscarriage, you'll have to account for that come the day of judgment, which feels a bit harsh to us, shall we say. But a lot of his advice is very sensible. You know, he's talking about what you can do to help you conceive, and about pregnant women needing to be looked after, needing to have rest, but still keeping themselves, you know, active in an appropriate way. He offers advice on diet. Some of that's quite dubious, Playhouse centers, because one of the things he encourages pregnant women to do is to drink wine. But he talks about the importance of being looked after properly in childbirth. He talks about the importance of having a period of recovery after childbirth, and that at that point, you're going to need all the delicate foods. Chicken again comes in at that point to help to restore use of strength after you've gone through labor. So, yeah, there is all of that. There's quite a lot of interest in baby care. And again, I mean, a lot of that is quite familiar to us. They're very keen on the idea of breastfeeding as being the healthiest option. And, yeah, very much looking after and stimulating your baby in the way that we still do. They're also quite interested, actually. We often think that disability was entirely blamed on sin in the Middle Ages, but they are quite interested in the relationship between lifestyle and certain disabilities. So, for example, blindness can be caused by, they think can be caused by diet. If you eat a lot of watery foods, that then. That all goes to your brain and then drains down into your eyes and causes cataracts, for example. Or that people who cry a lot can go blind. That can be something that can cause blindness. So even that there is a more
- [37:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
pragmatic element, too, that is very interesting to think about. And there's all sorts of similarities in the many things you've told us over the last half hour or so between medicine and ideas about healthy living between then and now. But there is a reason that we have a lot of these misconceptions, perhaps, or kind of overgeneralizations, I suppose, about the medieval period not being super healthy. And, yes, you've explained sort of that a lot of those conceptions we have now may not be exactly right, but surely some of them are right. What are some of the things that medieval people thought were healthy, that today we would go, you know what?
- [38:26]
Dr. Catherine Harvey
No, I think definitely the things that I wouldn't want to try would be a lot of the things around excretion and sort of keeping your bodily fluids in balance. And so they do sometimes talk about purging about deliberately making yourself vomit or go to the loo a lot. They're not terribly keen on that. They think it needs to be done very carefully and only in certain circumstances. But it is used as a form of preventative medicine and the one they're really keen on, that very much is part of the stereotype and I think justifiably so is phlebotomy. The idea that, you know, letting blood can be a way to stay healthy. And that is something that they do quite a lot. Having said that, even that is done in a more thought about way than we often tend to think. You know, they weren't just bleeding everybody willy nilly and taking pints and pints and making everybody die. You know, there was a lot of sort of careful consideration about who was this suitable for, when should it be done, how should it be done, how much blood should you take? But definitely for certain people, for the clergy in particular, phlebotomy was really important because medieval monks, for example, they eat a lot of fish for religious reasons. And we've already talked about how fish was problematic, causes buildups of phlegm, but also they weren't allowed to have sex and sex was seen as an important form of excretion in the Middle Ages and not having sex could potentially make you ill. So how do you deal with this if you're a cleric and you don't want to die? The answer seems to be regular bloodletting. And that definitely is something that they think helps to keep their humours balanced, helps to stop from getting ill. We wouldn't want to bring that one back. Definitely.
- [40:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that doesn't sound great, but it does sound like there are some lessons that readers today might take from this that would be things you'd suggest trying or at least consider. Is that right?
- [40:25]
Dr. Catherine Harvey
Well, I think definitely I quite like their emphasis on prevention. I think today we can be a little bit, oh, well, it's all right because medicine will be able to sort it out and often that is the case. But I think, you know, prevention is better than the cure, isn't it? And so we probably could take a bit of that. I think we are getting better at it actually than maybe we were even quite recently. Preventative medicine is becoming to be seen as more important. But definitely I think that is something we could take from them. And I think they're sort of quite holistic approach, you know, they're interested in all the things that can help to keep you healthy, how the mind and body work together. It does seem to me to be, in that sense, quite a sensible way of working. I definitely wouldn't want to go back and try medieval medicine. As we've said, there's a lot that you wouldn't want to try, but I do think their emphasis on thinking about sort of quality of life and what can keep you healthy, what can keep you away from the doctor, is probably a good one.
- [41:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. Actually, lots of interesting things to take from the conversation and the book, of course, as well. What might you be working on now that it's out in the world? Anything currently on your desk?
- [41:37]
Dr. Catherine Harvey
I'm playing around with a few things at the moment. I'm doing some work that will potentially become a book on medical treatments, which I think probably will be something a little bit less to be learning from, but hopefully quite interesting. And I've also got really quite interested in the history of longevity medicine and stories of people who were supposed to have lived a fantastically long time. And so that's something I'm dabbling in. I wrote a piece recently on a chap called Old Tom Parr, who he was actually was a bit later than this book. He was in the 17th century, but he was supposed to have lived to be 140something, I think it is, and he's taken off the court and everything and then suddenly dies, which rather spoils the story. But what is very interesting to me about these sorts of stories is how often they are very much conceptualized in terms of healthy living. And Tom Parr, his long life is very much sort of attributed to the fact he's lived a very healthy life in rural Shropshire in a healthy, simple diet, good clean air, good physical work. And it's only when he goes to London and starts eating too much and breathing the polluted air, everything that kills him. So this whole idea of healthy living and how it runs through history is something I'm still very much interested in.
- [42:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that does all sound like multiple interesting areas to explore. And of course, while you are doing that, listeners can read the book titled the Medieval Guide to Healthy Living, published by reaction in 2026 that we've been discussing. Katherine, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [43:12]
Dr. Catherine Harvey
Thank. You, sam.