At the same time that theologians in Central Europe were campaigning for frequent communion to heal the soul, Wycliffites in England were sceptical of the power of the Eucharist. Although John Wyclif was not connected to Jan Milič and his followers, he exploited the same grass roots approach to affective piety among the laity and his theology had a similarly profound impact on later proceedings at the councils of Constance and Basel. Wyclif stressed the ways in which the laity were healed through the pastoral duties of the preacher. Preaching was, for Wyclif, a penitential act in which Christ the ‘summus medicus’ cured the wounds of sin. Yet Wyclif argued that each member of the clergy resembled an incompetent surgeon who wounded (leserit) those he was entrusted to heal, harming congregations with tales ‘contra scripturam’ of no moral fortitude. Wyclif relays such a fictitious tale that he heard from a preacher:

Christus chirurgus, Christ the Divine Surgeon, performs open-heart surgery in this narrative, where the Eucharist enters the chest of the patient and cures his bodily illness. The emphasis the patient places on the fact that his infirmity is physical, accentuates that this was not a spiritual metaphor, but an act of surgery in which the host entered his body. Wyclif 's objection to the priest’s exemplum did not pertain to its medical component, but rather to its use for deception. The priest boasted, ‘the mouth fabricated that pretty little lie.’ Wyclif endorsed using an exemplum as a ‘preco vel ancilla’ [herald or handmaiden] to Scripture that encouraged devotion and helped congregations to digest God’s words, but he opposed the lie of the anecdote.