Who managed the infirmary (continued)

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Reconstructed infirmary arcade at Rievaulx
© Cistercians in Yorkshire Project
<click to enlarge>

The infirmary of Rievaulx, like that of other religious houses, was managed by the infirmarer (or server of the sick), who was a monastic official (obedientiary) of some prominence. This was a post held in the twelfth century by Walter Daniel, better known for his biography of Aelred, the third abbot of Rievaulx. Walter seems to have had some sort of professional training for he refers to himself as medicus and within his Life of Aelred includes graphic details of the abbot’s agonising pains – in particular, the suffering he endured from urinary stones. Walter also refers to the ailments of other monks such as the sub-prior of Revesby, who was miraculously cured of his feverish maladies by Abbot Aelred:

His vital force was so sapped up by their immoderate heat, his veins were so dried up, that he could scarce retain the panting breath in his body. His frame was so wretchedly wasted that it looked like the hollowed woodwork of a lute; eyes, face, hands, arms, feet, shins, blotched and misshapen, proclaimed that the death agony was drawing nearer and nearer. Only his voice begging God for a longer lease of life prevailed over matter in
the man. So the sick man lay upon his bed, his limbs scarcely holding together, for the contraction and loosening of his joints and nerves made them leap from the sockets of his bones, and only the fragile skin kept his body together, though hardly able, as his weakness grows upon him, to prevent it from falling entirely to pieces. (1)

Read more descriptions of sickness at Rievaulx

As abbot of Rievaulx, Aelred devoted considerable time and energy to visiting the sick brethren and has recently been described as a medical practitioner. This, however, perhaps requires some modification for although Aelred is referred to as 'medicus' this may have been intended as a compliment rather than a reference to his professional training.(2) Furthermore, by according Aelred this title it placed him in the tradition of the holy man as healer, following the example of Christ as the doctor.

In 1448-9 a London physician, Henry Wells, was summoned to Fountains Abbey to tend Abbot John Greenwell, who, it was thought, had been poisoned by William Downom, one of his monks; the reason that was given for William’s actions was the sick abbot’s refusal of the pottage William had prepared for him.
[Hammond and Talbot, A Biographical Register of the Medical Practitioners in Medieval England, pp 85-6.]

References to lay practitioners as witnesses in charters infer that medics were occasionally called in to minister to the community. For Rievaulx examples, see Talbot and Hammond, A Biographical Register of the Medical Practitioners, pp 1, 23, 50 .

The twelfth-century customary of the Cistercian Order (Ecclesiastica Officia) discusses the infirmarer’s managerial duties in some detail, but says little of his medical knowledge. The infirmarer – and no doubt others in the abbey – was probably well-versed in herbal remedies and used herbs from the abbey’s herb garden. He would also have had access to several medical treatises for these are included in the abbey’s library catalogues.(3) Whilst treatment of the sick would have generally been handled by the community, lay medical practitioners would probably have been summoned to tend the seriously ill; indeed Walter Daniel mentions that it was upon the instruction of physicians that Aelred drank a little wine to ease the pain of his urinary stones.(4) However, visits of this kind would have been expensive and external physicians were probably only summoned when absolutely necessary.(5)