Chaucer's Physician: Medicine and Literature in Fourteenth-Century England

Description: Describes fourteenth-century medical training and practice in England and documents physicians who were contemporary with Chaucer, suggesting that John de Middelton is the "perhaps most probable" candidate for a real-life model of Chaucer's Physician. Reads the GP description of the Physician as straightforward rather than ironic or satiric, and finds PhyT to be wholly appropriate to a man who is, in accord with medieval medical training, "first a clerk and only secondly a physician," comparing and contrasting PhyT with other Tales (most extensively ManT) that invite "moral reflection."