The hallmarks of medieval medical care were its variety and its intensity. Our own society boasts a relatively small (although growing) range of both medical institutions and publicly recognized medical practitioners, narrowly defined, similarly trained, and socially homogeneous. Medieval society, on the other hand, like many present-day traditional societies, looked to a much broader set of healers and strategies to care for its precarious health. In part this situation reflected much higher levels of illness than we are used to – levels that sprang from extensive poverty and unhealthy living conditions as much or more than the limits of medieval therapeutics. In part it reflected the variety of medieval society itself. A millenium separated the Europeans of 1500 from their counterparts in 500, and that millenium encompassed changes arguably far more radical than those of the five centuries that separate us from them. Furthermore, Europe was much more diverse then than now, when advances in transportation and communication and other social shifts have acted to homogenize institutions and to break down cultural and linguistic barriers between nations, between city and countryside, between rich and poor.

For these reasons, historians have tended to describe medieval medicine as a dense set of discrete forms of theory and practice tenuously related – if related at all – whose principles frequently contradicted one another and whose practitioners rarely overlapped: physic and surgery, academic medicine and empirical medicine, rational medicine and magical medicine, men's medicine and women's medicine, religious medicine and secular medicine, medicine of the rich and medicine of the poor.