Health and Healing

Illness in medieval Bulgarian lands could bring a person into contact with learned medicine, practical remedies, family care or a religious community. These responses overlapped: a monastery could preserve books, receive a sufferer seeking a saint’s help and provide a bed for someone unable to continue a journey. The changing territories of the Bulgarian empires also belonged to a wider Byzantine and Slavic world in which texts and practitioners travelled.

On this page5 sections

Knowledge of the body

John the Exarch, active around the beginning of the tenth century, included discussion of the human body in his Shestodnev, or Hexaemeron. The title refers to the six days of Creation. This Christian explanatory work drew on Greek learning to discuss the natural world and humanity’s place within it. Its treatment of anatomy placed bodily knowledge within a religious account of creation.

John recognised that physicians possessed specialist knowledge. Describing parts of the body was therefore connected with an existing learned field, even though his book was not a manual for treating every illness. Translation brought Greek concepts into Slavic writing and required words for organs, bodily processes and disease. That vocabulary helped later readers discuss health in their own literary language.

Books and practitioners

Medical knowledge circulated through copying as well as direct instruction. A thirteenth-century manuscript of John’s work preserves a glossary of medicinal terms, part of the later Slavic transmission of the text. A glossary made difficult names more intelligible and could connect a plant or condition with an explanation familiar to a reader.

References to individual practitioners also survive in medieval Balkan records. Historians cite a physician named Eustathios in the region of Meglen during the Byzantine period. Such cases locate specialist healing within particular communities and careers. Knowledge could cross political boundaries with the people who possessed it, rather than remaining confined to a Bulgarian royal court or one monastery.

A physician had to interpret signs of illness before choosing a response. Learned medicine inherited Greek discussions of the body and the properties of substances, while individual treatment depended on the practitioner’s knowledge and the materials at hand. The distinction between a medical writer, a practising healer and a patient matters because each participated in this system in a different way.

Plants and medicinal materials

Medieval medical writing discussed substances whose effect depended on their preparation and use. John’s natural knowledge included plants such as hellebore, mandrake and poppy, which could be discussed as dangerous as well as medicinal. The same material might be associated with healing in one context and harm in another.

Obtaining an ingredient was only one stage of making a remedy. Plants had to be identified and gathered, and a preparation could involve crushing, combining or extracting material. Written names helped transmit recipes and descriptions, but recognising the correct substance remained a practical skill.

Care, shelter and recovery

Care also meant warmth, rest, food and assistance. Gregory Pakourianos’s foundation rule of 1083 provided hospices attached to the Bachkovo establishment, founded while the region was under Byzantine rule. The provision included beds and heating, with continued shelter for travellers too weak to leave. This was a practical response to illness interrupting a journey.

Keeping such a place usable required supplies and supervision. Fuel warmed the room, bedding accommodated the guest and food sustained someone unable to work or travel. An endowed religious foundation could organise these resources through its property and personnel, linking charity with the management of an estate.

Saints and the search for healing

People also sought healing through prayer and saints. The lives of John of Rila describe visitors seeking help from the hermit, and later devotion centred on his relics. Relics were physical remains associated with a holy person; approaching them brought a sufferer or their family to a shrine where prayer and offerings could take place.

These accounts presented the saint as an intercessor before God. A reported recovery contributed to the shrine’s reputation and encouraged further visits. For a medieval believer, bodily suffering could therefore lead to a religious journey as well as a search for a remedy. Monasteries and churches offered a setting in which prayer, companionship and material help could accompany that search.