When Margery Kempe faces the most dangerous illness of her lifetime – the postpartum trauma that threatens her with psychosomatic annihilation – she is cured not by physicians or medicines, but by the appearance of a ‘most bewtyuows’ Christ, whose blessed ‘chere’ effects her instant stabilisation and return to the concerns of the household. In a broader healing paradigm, Kempe would have later received the sacrament during the purification rite, also known as women's Churching after childbirth, when the medicating effect of Christ's body in communion encapsulates the transformative potentialities of holy flesh. Through this lesson in spiritual medicina Kempe's curative understanding is established, as she places her faith in the efficacy of divine treatment. This faith is dramatically tested many years later when a stone and piece of wood from the vault in St Margaret's Church fall onto her back, a blow so terrible that she ‘ferd as sche had be deed a lytyl whyle’ (21). On crying, ‘Ihesu mercy … hir peyne was gon’ (21–2). That this injury is likely to have occurred on 9 June 1413, just two weeks before Margery and John Kempe's vow of chastity, illustrates how crucial Kempe's surety in God's medicine is. For this pain removal and divine rescue coincide with the vow that, in its Godly ordination, symbolises another type of cure for Kempe's corporeal scourge, and sets her more fixedly on her own path as a physician.

The discourse of Christus medicus, or Christ the Physician, was ubiquitous in the Christian Middle Ages, originating from biblical depictions of God as the healer of body and soul. The etymology of the term ‘doctor’ is in fact fused with religious teaching in the late Middle Ages, emphasising the conceptual crossover between spirituality and medicine that Kempe understands and manifests. Ideas about the medicinal qualities of the Eucharist were also widely disseminated through preaching in the late Middle Ages. The Book of Ecclesiasticus states: