Welcome to...modern America? By the late 1400s in Europe, you can finally talk about a “medical marketplace.” There were any number of medical specialists you could consult for all types of problems and preventatives—from dentists and oculists on up to university-trained physicians. If you had a go-to favorite practitioner, regardless of their specialty, you might head there regardless of the actual problem. But say you’re an immigrant to Nuremberg; you don’t know anyone; you’re hearing good and bad things about everyone; even the city’s lead surgeon, a barber named Hans Folz, just got sued for making someone’s arm wound worse so he’d have to amputate for more revenue.

No, you have a problem, and you trust the crafts and their specialty practitioners. (Nuremberg has not had guilds since 1348-49, when the patricians crushed an artisan uprising.)

Now, you’d probably know if you were dealing with snakebite or an infected tooth that needed to be yanked, so you can rule out those doctors. I assume you’re not visibly pregnant, so you’re not headed for a midwife. For the sake of argument let’s assume you’re also not invisibly pregnant and looking for an off-market, non-guild woman or man with a reputation for providing remedies that, as the texts say, “restore the menses.”

If it’s before about 1530, you are almost certainly going to be praying fervently to one of the fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of saints especially popular in the late Middle Ages for...being holy and helping? St. Katherine of Alexandria is probably your go-to wherever in Europe you are. You and your family are also praying like mad to St. Sebastian, patron saint of people suffering with pestilence (a.k.a. the Black Death), that you’re not in its early stages.

After 1530...yeah, you’re probably still praying for some kind of intervention, although if you’re in a Protestant area you’ll gradually replace Margaret of Antioch and Ursula with, for the first time in Christian culture, your guardian angel.

But if you’ve got the money—let’s say, urban bourgeoisie or patrician, or landed lower nobility—you really have three basic options for some kind of persisting upper respiratory thing that’s worse than normal: apothecary, barber, or physician.

A physician is probably overkill, in all honesty. There aren’t that many of them, and there’s a good chance they’re more concerned with theoretical stuff anyway. You want someone whose bookshelf is stocked with a couple of the new genre of vernacular (German) professional treatises on preventing plague, dealing with symptoms from the bad air in enclosed workshops (LPT: open the window), all the many uses of rosewater. After all, these books cite Galen and Avicenna, the same auctoritates Latin physician people do. And they’re in a language you know and trust—Folz, our crafty craftsman, even wrote two different treatises on how to prevent pestilence because he was unhappy with how physicians translated the Latin recipes into German.

Now, if you need any kind of recipe (prescription), you’ll end up at the apothecary anyway. Well, in theory. Barbers, oculists, and other non-apothecaries were not legally permitted to sell spices and other Rezepte ingredients. Of course, some did. Just like apothecaries were not allowed to diagnose and treat illness, but...Hey, these are the days when Augsburg’s got Protestants and Catholics living side by side and tavern-keepers are selling food outside meal hours!

But most likely, if you’re not getting the results you want from your saint, angel, or herbal specialist (...not THAT kind of “herbal specialist”), you’re off to the barber.

Some cities guilds’ will distinguish among barbers and barber-surgeons, but again, it’s not nearly so precise in practice. Barbers’ main jobs are leeching and treating pestilence. Yup, physicians could legally beg off treating plague and flee to the countryside. This was the #1 was to prevent pestilence, according to barber authors who...were legally required to remain in pestilence-stricken cities to treat people. As for the “surgeon” part, well...you remember our buddy Folz up there.

But you’re just generally miserable. Probably the barber is going to leech you. They might prescribe a recipe as well, especially if they’ve got the ingredients literally under the counter. Oh, yeah, and to help determine which, you’re going to be peeing into a flask at either the barber or the apothecary.

...so they can diagnose you based on the color of your urine! I TOLD you, not that kind of herbal specialist!

How common was opium/opiates? We're they commonly used to treat pain for Joe peasent? or was it used mostly by the upper class?