This belief severely limited the amount of knowledge western doctors were able to acquire about the workings of the human body. God punished the wicked by plaguing them with disease or illness. This belief and others such as the touch of a royal person restoring the afflicted to health meant that medicine did not have a practical base in the lay person's thinking. This attitude, although appearing somewhat superstitious to most people in the 'scientific' late twentieth century, should not be a point of criticism because the majority of the medieval population had a very strong belief in the existence of God and in His intimate involvement in their daily lives. Their attitudes and practices are a logical outcome of these beliefs.
Medieval medicine appears to lack a degree of scientific knowledge.
Many of the roots of medieval medical knowledge were based on the classical learning of the ancient Greeks and what they believed the human body was like, with ideas such as the heart being the control centre for the body's activities not the brain. Some of the written information we have about medieval medicine is contained in the fifteen books that the Faculty of Medicine in Paris acquired in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Portions of the fifteen books appear to be direct translations from classical writings by scholars such as Hippocrates. What we would now consider as basic scientific principles, were not available to medieval researchers. The medieval practitioner had no idea that, for example, germs existed or that a healthy diet was important.