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Life of a physician in middle ages

            The Life of a Physician in the Middle Ages.
             Medicine is a field that is constantly changing at a pace that is hard to keep up with. Today, hospitals and offices a filled with doctors who depend on the hard facts of science to treat their patients; but it was not always that way. A physician's life in the middle ages was based on years of training and knowledge combined with the mystical aspects of astrology and religion. Geoffrey Chaucer uses a physician as an accurate description of a doctor in the middle ages in his book The Canterbury Tales.
             During the middle ages there existed a hierarchy of medical practitioners. As Bryon Grigsby states, "On the top of the hierarchy is the learned doctor who deals with specific congenital malformations and complexion imbalances. The surgeon stands in the middle and deals with major trauma, while the barber in on the bottom and performs minor surgery . . . " (4) This hierarchy existed to keep each of the different fields out of the others. Each class had their own specific tasks that they were trained to perform and were not supposed to interfere in the fields of the others. This however, did not stop a barber or physician from performing a complex surgery, or a surgeon from prescribing drugs for a fever. The hierarchy simply allowed the people to know what each person specialized in so they could decide whom to request for help. (Grigsby 4) The most common of these classes was the barber surgeon. This would be a normal barber who would perform such tasks as bloodletting or cauterization (Grigsby 4). These barbers had no degree and were also the cheapest to have simple surgery or other practices performed by (Burns 207). The trained surgeon was the rarest of the three and did not usually treat the lower class people. Surgeons were appointed by kings and nobility for personal use and were extremely well off as long as their lord stayed alive and healthy.


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