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Dr Richard Sowerby is Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh.

During the early Middle Ages, men and women recognized that their efforts to heal the sick did not always end in success. Churchmen told stories about individuals who had visited both doctors and saints’ shrines for years searching for cures that never came; doctors spoke openly about the reputational damage which they might suffer if their treatments proved ineffective; and books of remedies sometimes contained within them tools for determining in advance whether medical interventions would succeed or fail. In this paper, I want to look closer into the ways that early medieval people thought about how and why medicine (or other forms of healing) sometimes failed, in comparable ways across Christian and Islamicate societies. Our sources suggest that it was common for the sick to encounter multiple, competing explanations for medical success and failure, and that their own health-seeking behaviour was determined in part by the degree to which they found those explanations persuasive.

Dr Richard Sowerby is Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh.