This successful remedy abstracted from a text compiled by Franciscans in England between 1416 and 1425 was credited to Brother William Holme. He sold the ointment for a very high price to a desperate knight of the Punchardon family, who gave the remedy its name. This gives us a dramatic insight into Holme's lucrative surgical practice at court c. 1400. The ointment is found under the heading Malum mortuum (a kind of scabbing of flesh on the body's extremities) in a remedy book the Franciscans put together five hundred years ago for the use of their brethren, and subsequently for other readers to profit from, friars or not. It serves to introduce us to the twin themes of this book, the practice and medical writing of English friars.

The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England aims first and foremost to recuperate the contribution, almost entirely overlooked, made by English friars to medicine between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It will show that members of the four orders of friars practised medicine and wrote or compiled books about medicine. As medical practitioners, the friars sometimes took payment for their remedies, just as other kinds of practitioners did, but they also supplied medical services to their brothers, and provided charitable relief to lay people – who might also be recipients of their spiritual services, that is preaching, religious instruction and confession. At the highest level of society, some friars were retained by royalty, nobles or bishops as both healers and confessors. But the patients of the friars might also be much humbler lay folk. In attending the sick or the dying in their homes, or within an infirmary or hospital setting, friars could offer both bodily and spiritual healing. There could of course be tension between these two healing roles, and between the friar as mass-priest or administrator of sacraments, and the friar as medical practitioner.