Drugs, Books, Patients: Marketing Medieval Medicine

Paper given by Walt Schalick

Delivered at the University of Wisconsin on 14 March 2018

Modern health care faces innumerable structural challenges. From the opioid crisis to pandemic threats to hospital-community churn, easy solutions elude us. In this talk, based on Schalick’s research over the last 20 years, he will explore some of these topics over the long haul.

Because a number of health care structures were established in the Middle Ages — including universities, drug prescriptions, and medicalized hospitals — Schalick will try to answer questions about how medieval medicine laid the groundwork for drug regulations, including for opiates; how the explosion of medieval medical education drove the early professionalization of European medicine; and how those changes affected the patient experience.


Walt Schalick is a historian of medicine and a pediatric rehabilitation physician. Schalick is a professor at the University of Wisconsin as well as the medical director for the Central Wisconsin Center, which assists people who have developmental disabilities.