There is little to be said, at this period, of the profession most directly concerned with sickness, epidemic or other, namely the medical. We become aware of its existence on rare occasions: as in the account of the death of William the Conqueror at Rouen on 9 September, 1087, of the illness and death of Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, on 13 July, 1205, at one of his manors on a journey to Rochester[107], or in the reference by William of Newburgh, to the noted Jewish physician of King’s Lynn, whose honourable repute among the citizens for skill and modesty did not save him from the murderous fanaticism against his race in 1190[108], or in occasional letters of the time[109]. There were doubtless benevolent men among the practitioners of medicine, then as now; but the profession has never been one in which individuals could rise conspicuously above the level of their age, and the moral standard of those centuries was a poor one. It is not surprising, then, that John of Salisbury, indulging a taste for epigram, should have characterized the profession of medicine in the twelfth century as follows: “They have only two maxims which they never violate, ‘Never mind the poor; never refuse money from the rich’[110].” The one English physician whose writings have come down to us from the period that we are still engaged with, is John of Gaddesden. There is every reason to think that he was practising at the time of the famine and pestilence of 1315-16; but it is not from his bulky treatise on medicine that we learn the nosological types of the epidemic maladies of those years. Some account of his _Rosa Anglica_ will be found in the chapter on Smallpox; it must suffice to say here that he was a verbalist compiler from other books, themselves not altogether original, and that, according to Dr Freind, he displays no great knowledge of his profession. It is nothing strange, therefore, that Gaddesden throws no light upon the famine-pestilences of England, such as those of 1315-16, which he lived through. Dysentery and lientery, he treats of almost in the very words of Gilbertus Anglicus; but those maladies might have been among the dwellers in another planet, so far as native experience comes in. He reproduces whole chapters from his predecessors, on _synochus_ and _synocha_, without a hint that England ever witnessed such scenes of hunger-typhus as the St Albans chroniclers have recorded for us from their own observation. The reference by Trokelowe to the prevalence of _pestis gutturuosa_ in 1316, is one that a medical writer of the time might well have amplified; but Gaddesden missed the opportunity of perhaps anticipating Fothergill’s description of putrid sore-throat by more than four hundred years. Epidemics of St Anthony’s Fire, or Ergotism.