Research

Medieval Placebo Effect: Hope and Belief in Healthcare in Christian Southern Europe 1100-1500

 

MedPlaceboEffect seeks to recover how hope and expectation for cure, belief, and trust configured late medieval medicine and the healing encounter. We ask how intellectual, social, and cultural forces articulated and applied the idea that health may be improved by evoking certain sensibilities. In this, the project brings to the fore the centrality of the mental aspects of the therapeutic encounter within medieval healing. It looks at how seemingly soft parameters formulated the connections among practitioners and patients.

MedPlaceboEffect, is an integrative project. Focusing on Southern Europe between 1100-1500, we examine a range of sources, among them medical and theological treatises, practical medical literature, miracle accounts, and archival documents to address theories, practices and social structures. Here are some of the questions we are interested in:

 

How did the disciplines of medicine, natural philosophy, and theology understand the impact of hope and belief (or despair and disbelief) on health? How was success or failure in healing measured? What defined expertise and the effective healer? What were the social mechanisms set to define faithful medicines and faithful healers? What directed commercial/healing liaisons and in what ways they reflect trust networks? How faith and trust were calculated into healing practices, within and across religious communities?

 

MedPlaceboEffect carries out a continuous dialogue with researchers outside the historical disciplines, to advance new ways of thinking about the concept of placebo effect and about the role of psycho-social aspects in healthcare, then and now.

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Read more about our research on CORDIS.

Grant agreement ID: 101076503