Portrait of the ›arzet‹

Medieval medicine could do little to aid the seriously ill. Popular attitudes toward the ›arzet‹, as reflected in the vernacular literature of the age, ran the gamut from admiration to skepticism to mockery to rejection, across a range of genres from chivalric epics to mystical texts. The university-trained doctor, schooled in the Galenic system, strove to set himself above the many other competing healers and outright charlatans offering their services to the ill. The task was made all the more difficult given the impossibility often to distinguish medicine from magic. Surprisingly, the critique of the medical profession never quite reached the level of contempt that would, centuries later, be directed at doctors in the age of COVID, when medicine had advanced so far and achieved so much.