Thomas Usk and John Arderne
摘要
New evidence suggests that Thomas Usk, author, scribe, reader of Chaucer, and political factionalist, had anal surgery in the 1370s. This odd, intimate biographical fact adds another piece of information to our knowledge about Usk's life, recently expanded by Caroline Barron's very significant discovery that Usk was clerk for the Goldsmiths' Company.1 It also tells us more about the circles in which Usk moved and about the community of patients treated by John Arderne, Usk's surgeon. Considering the connection between Arderne and Usk might also encourage us to think more about the place of medical writing (and of other “pragmatic” texts) in late-medieval textual communities.The evidence comes from Arderne's immensely popular medical tract about how to operate on anal fistulas. We know of forty pre-1600 manuscripts of Arderne's Practica, eight of which are in Middle English, representing four separate translations from the Latin.2 There are further manuscripts of his other works. Arderne tells us in his works that he was born around 1307, that at the time of the plague (1349–50) he lived at Newark in Nottinghamshire, and that in 1370 he came to London.3 In 1376, he produced his Practica about the treatment of anal fistulas. Arderne's writings included detailed (often illustrated) descriptions of surgical procedures and served to promote both medical knowledge and John Arderne. Arderne has been described as a “brilliant publicist,”4 and his Practica opens with something like a curriculum vitae of a surgeon to the stars as he details his case histories.5 His incipit reads, in one of the English translations: I, John Arderne fro the first pestilence that was in the Ʒere of oure lord 1349 duellid in Newerk in Notyngham-shire unto the Ʒere of oure lord 1370, and ther I helid many men of fistula in ano. Of whiche the first was Sire Adam Eueryngham of laxton-in-the-clay byside Tukkesford; whiche Sire Adam, forsoth, was in Gascone with sir Henry, that tyme named Erle of derb