This chapter will focus on one English friar, whose career as both medical practitioner and author or compiler can be explored at a greater level of detail than any other. It will also turn out to be an exploration of the boundary between medical practice and medical writing by friars. William Holme OFM is the friar most frequently mentioned in the Tabula medicine as practising medicine, and whose practice seems to have been exemplary for the compilers of that text. He also wrote or compiled two medical texts himself. The overlap between these two areas of Holme's activity is not easy to see. Neither of the texts under his name were cited as authorities in the Tabula medicine, and the compilers probably knew William Holme only as a successful Franciscan medical practitioner. Contrariwise, neither of Holme's two medical works make mention of the Tabula medicine, probably because they were written before the Tabula medicine was compiled. One work by Holme was dated to the year 1415, which is one year before the beginning of the compilation of the Tabula medicine. Perhaps William Holme only turned to writing after his practice of medicine ceased. Cases where he treated patients in the Tabula medicine seem to belong to the end of the fourteenth rather than the fifteenth century. Because the subject of this book deals with medical practice and medical writing by friars, Holme is a particularly intriguing case study, as he is the only friar clearly associated with both these spheres of activity. In this chapter I will consider Holme's medical practice first and then his writings.

Holme's Medical Practice

We know more about Holme's patients and his medical practice than we do for any other English medieval practitioner, with the single exception of Thomas Fayreford. Links between the two of them are worthy of consideration. Fayreford, who seems to have flourished in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, would have been aware of William Holme's fame as a practitioner. Fayreford spent time at Oxford and read widely in practical medical literature.