Home Remedies. Most people in the modern world experience medicine either in a physician's or dentist's office, a local clinic, or a hospital. However, in Renaissance Europe educated physicians were few, clinics as such did not exist, and hospitals served mainly as shelters for the poor and provided only limited medical care. University- trained physicians and surgeons in the late Middle Ages numbered no more than ten to fifteen per ten thousand inhabitants and were concentrated in larger towns and cities, where their expensive services were utilized chiefly by the elite. The bulk of healing was done at home, not by medical doctors making house calls but by family members, by men and women of the community who were experienced in folk ways and had empirical knowledge of herbs, or by a whole range of professional healers who made up what historians...