Magical medicine in Viking Scandinavia.

BY THE year A.D. 1213 Christianity was victorious across Europe; only a few isolated pockets of paganism in remote districts of Sweden, Finland, and Moslem Spain held out against what must have seemed to be the inevitable influence of the Church. Nordic expansion was in eclipse. The age of the Vikings was at an end. The marauders who had loosed such fury on the continent to the south, had, in the end, succumbed to the cultural influence of the very peoples against whom their expeditions had been directed. The mare nostrum of the Roman age had long since ceased to be the centre of European political gravity. Even in cultural matters the domination of Rome and the Mediterranean was being challenged. A thousand years had elapsed since the death of Galen, the dominant authority in medieval medical practice. Avicenna, Rhazes, Isaac Judaeus, and Albucasis, the towering figures of Arabic medicine, had been dead some two hundred years. The renowned medical school at Salerno was in full maturity. The date 1213 is significant in the medical history of Scandinavia because it marks the year in which the kindly Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, the most famous physician in medieval Scandinavia, lost his life in the very middle of a productive and multifaceted career. Hrafn's life may be looked upon as something of a watershed in the medical history of Scandinavia. Behind him were eons of magical medicine in the Germanic past, when wise-women and conjurers recited their incantations against the spirits of disease and sufferers from diverse illnesses called upon the gods of the North for a return of health. In front of Hrafn was the ever-increasing influence of the medical centres on the continent from which the doctrines of Galenic and Arabic medicine were being disseminated. There is more of the new in Hrafn than there is of the old; one can find in his medical practice the distinctive mark of the Salernitan school' grafted on to native concepts of disease. Even before Hrafn, the new medicine of the south was making inroads throughout Scandinavia. It had undoubtedly begun to follow the Christian religion to Iceland after the conversion of that country in A.D. 1000. From Latin sources we know that there was a Roman infirmary near the present site of Diisseldorf in northern Germany by the first century A.D.