1 - Mary the Physician: Women, Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages

Summary

The idea of Christ the Physician was widespread in the Middle Ages because cure of the soul was seen as an essential aspect of medical care. Yet for women in particular, the Virgin Mary seems to have had associations with medicine that went beyond her more generally recognised associations with intercessory healing and with childbirth. One of the defining and distinctive qualities of women's visions in the post-Conquest period is the increasing importance of the role played by the Virgin Mary, and some of these visions illustrate vividly Mary's medical role. At the same time, the Virgin Mary was central to the everyday religious life of women in the late medieval household, and prayers to Mary and other forms of Marian devotion were connected not only to motherhood but also to healthcare more broadly. This essay explores the interaction of spiritual and physical health in writing by and about late medieval English women. It argues that the belief in Mary as Physician, in Mary as a doctor of medicine, in late medieval England was closely linked to, and indeed validated, the role of the woman as healer.

The importance of Christ the Physician is examined in Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa's study of the connections between health of the soul and health of the body in the writings of the two late medieval European women visionaries, Marie d’Oignies and Margery Kempe. As Yoshikawa explains:

The basis of this type of convergence between the Christian faith and medieval medicine is the concept of Christus medicus, or Christ the physician, which was firmly established during the Middle Ages. This concept dates back to the synoptic gospels where Christ was conceived as the physician of both soul and body. St Augustine (c. 354–430), among others, made frequent use of the idea of Christus medicus. He saw the Passion of Christ as the best medicine through which man might recover his spiritual and physical health.

Yoshikawa's primary focus is on the importance to late medieval female visionary experience of the belief in the ‘medicinal qualities of the Eucharist’. Nevertheless, at the same time, Yoshikawa also addresses the centrality to women's mystical writings of visions of and meditations on the Purification of the Virgin.