What legacy did the medicine of the friars leave in England? The dissolution of the friars’ houses in 1537–8 marks an end to the three centuries after the 1220s in which the friars and their houses were an integral part of the civic landscape in England. This disruption in which the personnel were dispersed, the remaining possessions of the friars seized and the very buildings taken over by private individuals or pulled down for stone to build elsewhere was catastrophic and final. The libraries of books and the records kept in the muniments of the friaries were scattered, and only a few books remain testifying to their previous ownership by friars. Attempts under Queen Mary I to re-found friaries as part of the restoration of the Catholic faith came to nought. Of monastic foundations, those medieval hospitals which had developed a medical role were more likely to survive than other kinds of house (for example, St Bartholomew's Hospital in London). The infirmaries of the friars, however, were not spared. It might appear at first sight then that the medicine of the friars was swept away with the rest. But this is not the whole picture. Some medical manuscripts compiled and owned by friars did survive and found new secular users, even after the advance of print technology had seemed to make manuscripts themselves redundant. Print in fact also helped the medicine of the friars by giving widespread circulation to texts which might otherwise have been lost. In this way, it enabled access for readers who would never have been able to read them in the heyday of the friars.

This chapter explores the legacy of the friars in medicine. It considers the survival of significant medical texts and manuscripts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The works of Roger Bacon and Henry Daniel found in manuscripts were prized by collectors both before and after the dissolution of the friaries. Most of these texts travelled not in the guise of historical relics of earlier ages but were valued for practical purposes and repackaged in print, as if they were the work of contemporary secular authorities.