Medieval medicine of Western Europe  From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search "Anatomical Man" (also
"Zodiacal Man"), Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (Ms.65,
f.14v, early 15th century)  Medieval medicine in Western Europe
was composed of a mixture of existing ideas from antiquity,
spiritual influences and what Claude Lévi-Strauss identifies as
the "shamanistic complex" and "social consensus."[1] In this
era, there was no tradition of scientific medicine, and
observations went hand-in-hand with spiritual influences.  In
the Early Middle Ages, following the fall of the Roman Empire,
standard medical knowledge was based chiefly upon surviving
Greek and Roman texts, preserved in monasteries and
elsewhere.[2] Ideas about the origin and cure of disease were
not, however, purely secular, but were also based on a world
view in which factors such as destiny, sin, and astral
influences played as great a part as any physical cause. The
efficacy of cures was similarly bound in the beliefs of p