The Veterinary Magic of the Middle Ages

The year is 1266, and your horse is acting strange. It started with a fever. But then weeping pustules appeared all over its body, and fluids poured forth from every orifice. Not long after, the horse stabled next to it came down with the same sickness. You’ve heard of this before. It’s the dreaded disease called farcy—and you’ll need more than medicine to make your animals well again.

When creatures like these hapless horses fell ill, medieval peasants and nobles alike relied on the occult powers of animal healers, forerunners to today’s veterinarians. Employing magic words and rituals alongside early medicines, these horse doctors and hound charmers faced down the most incurable of diseases with a combination of faith, tradition and science. Often at odds in the modern mind, the boundaries between these elements of everyday life were far more ambiguous during the Middle Ages; defined by medievalist Kathryn Walton as “actions that medieval people took to influence their world in some way,” magic was just another option in a healer’s toolbox.

Until recently, veterinary historians largely ignored the practices of medieval vets, instead tracing the profession’s rise to Claude Bourgelat’s establishment of a veterinary medicine school in France in 1761. Even in medieval Europe, some learned doctors scoffed at magical remedies “as the sort of thing uneducated ‘old women’ did,” says Lea Olsan, an emeritus historian at the University of Louisiana Monroe. Today, however, a growing number of scholars are working to break down anachronistic distinctions between magic, religion and science, showing modern audiences how to view the world as medieval veterinarians—who ran the gamut from quacks to trained professionals—did.

The medieval menagerie

During the Middle Ages, animal diseases could be terrifying—and devastating. For commoners, horses, pigs, sheep and donkeys were important investments, crucial tools and even beloved companions.

“It’s a society that relied heavily on animals for pretty much everything,” says Sunny Harrison, an expert on medieval medicine at the Open University in the United Kingdom and the author of a recent paper on horse-healing rituals. “Agriculturally, but also industrially, for transport, for warfare, for diplomacy—very little got done without animals.”

For the elite, animals like horses, hawks and greyhounds were important status symbols, meaning when one fell ill, their wealthy owners sought the best veterinary care available.

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