This article, written by an American in Afrikaans after having spent a short spell in the Department of Psychiatry, Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, describes the situation in medicine and dentistry at the beginning of the second millennium AD. It traces the history of medicine during the last part of the Dark Ages (the first part of the Middle Ages) and the more enlightened second half of the Middle Ages. It looks in more detail at the life of St Hildegard and her views about, and influence on, the medical knowledge at the time.
