Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Mirfeld, John
MIRFELD, JOHN (fl. 1393), writer on medicine, whose name is written Marifeldus by Leland (Commentarii de Scriptt. Brit. c. 582), was a canon regular of St. Austin in the priory of St. Bartholomew in West Smithfield, London. He studied at Oxford, and there attended the medical lectures of Nicholas Tyngewich. He received medical instruction from a London practitioner, whom he calls ‘my master,’ but does not name, and who was a bold operator. He witnessed tapping of the brain and the healing of an incised wound of the stomach, as well as the partial cure of a paralysis due to cerebral hæmorrhage caused by a fall from a horse. John Helme, one of the brethren of the neighbouring foundation of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, taught him how to treat the plague. About 1387 he wrote a great treatise on medicine, entitled ‘Breviarium Bartholomæi,’ of which there is a fine manuscript copy, written in that year for the hospital of St. John the Baptist attached to the Abbey of Abingdon, in the library of Pembroke College, Oxford, and two imperfect ones in the British Museum, which both belonged to Dr. John Dee [q. v.] The ‘Breviarium’ is divided into fifteen parts, viz.: 1, fevers; 2, affections of the whole body; 3, of the head, neck, and throat; 4, of the chest; 5, of the abdomen; 6, of the pelvic organs; 7, of the legs; 8, of boils; 9, of wounds and bruises; 10, of fractures and dislocations; 11, of dislocations of joints; 12, of simple medicines; 13, of compound medicines; 14, of purgatives; 15, of the preservation and recovery of health. It contains many interesting cases and original remarks. He had read Gaddesden, the Arabians, and the ‘Regimen Sanitatis Salerni.' He tells how to make gingerbread, and gives the English names of many diseases, among them ‘smalpockes,’ one of the earliest citations of this term. He is an excellent teller of stories, and his accounts of the Augustinian canon thrown from his horse, of the fraudulent innkeeper's tricks, and of the doings of a mad dog are superior in detail and liveliness to the best narratives of Gaddesden. He also wrote ‘Parvus Tractatus de Signis Prognosticis Mortis’ (Lambeth Library MS. 444). In 1393 he appeared in a court of law to represent the convent of St. Bartholomew in West Smithfield.
[Breviarium Bartholomæi, manuscript in library of Pembroke College, Oxford, and that in the Harleian Collection, No. 3; Anecdota Oxoniensa, Sinonima Bartholomei, edited by J.L. G. Mowat (this is a part of the Pembroke copy of the Breviarium); Norman Moore's Progress of Medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, 1889, an Introductory Lecture on the Principles and Practice of Medicine, Lancet, No. 3659, containing several extracts from the Pembroke MS.]