Dr. Norman Moore says: 'The basis of medicine is the patient.'[129] This being so, as the patient always exists the medicine man must always have been required.
Those whose duty it was to combat disease among the Saxons seem to have been of little account, if we are to judge from the Rev. Oswald Cockayn's collection of _Leechdoms, Wort-cunning and Star Craft of Early England_, published in the Master of the Rolls' Series (1864); and Dr. J.F.Payne's _Fitzpatrick Lectures on the History of Medicine_, 1903.
The Saxon leech received a professional education, and was often learned although he did not advance knowledge. He seems to have placed more reliance upon charms and magic than upon any sensible treatment. He compounded recipes of the most incongruous character, and paid special attention to the use of herbs, but few instances of cures performed by him are recorded.
It is not until after the Conquest that we are able to find the first signs of the noble profession of to-day.
It is said that mediæval medicine first began to emerge from obscurity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Jews and the clergy were among the first to practise medicine. A noted Jewish physician is recorded by William of Newburgh as practising at King's Lynn at the end of the twelfth century, but shortly afterwards the Jews were driven out of the country, and we hear no more of them except of an occasional physician who managed to escape the general outlawry of his nation. The clergy also in course of time largely gave over their noble attempts to heal their fellow-citizens, and a medical profession was gradually formed.
John of Salisbury (d. 1180), the friend and counsellor of Thomas à Becket, who is called by Bishop Stubbs 'the central figure of English learning for thirty years,' and may therefore be considered to some extent as an authority on the subject, had a very poor opinion of the medical profession of his day, and rated its members roundly for their ignorance and incompetence. He affirmed that they had two maxims which they never violated--'Never mind the poor; never refuse money from the rich.'
There was no school of anatomy or surgery throughout England in the age of Chaucer and Wyclyf, but the medical schools of Salerno, Naples and Montpellier were attended by Englishmen. St. Luke is usually considered as the patron saint of the medical profession, but in the Middle Ages he was to a great extent dispossessed by St. Cosmas and St. Damian,[130] two brothers, who practised as physicians in Cilicia, and were martyred in the early part of the fourth century. These were the patron saints of the Company of Barber Surgeons, but the Fellowship of Surgeons, whose history has been written by Mr. D'Arcy Power,[131] kept St. Luke's Day as well as that of St. Cosmas and St. Damian.