The life of Andrew Boorde, c1490-1549

Physician, traveller, writer and spy, Andrew Boorde was born c1490 and became a Carthusian monk after abandoning his medical studies at Oxford. Temperamentally unsuited to the life of a religious, after 20 years at the London Charterhouse he obtained a dispensation to travel to Europe to continue his medical studies. Returning to England he began to practise medicine, treating members of the nobility and, through a meeting with Thomas Cromwell which was to influence the rest of his life, he attended the King, Henry VIII. In 1534, after a second, more extensive, tour of Europe in which he visited many medical schools and universities seeking yet more medical knowledge, he returned to the London Charterhouse which was undergoing a brutal dissolution at the hands of Thomas Cromwell. Boorde reluctantly signed the Oath of Supremacy, an act which was to haunt him for the rest of his life. He was then used by Cromwell to travel abroad again but this time as a spy to gather intelligence for the King while continuing to study medicine. Boorde finally took his MD at the University of Montpellier and was incorporated in the same degree a year later at Oxford. He then gave expression to all he had learnt by writing his legacy, four books which were published in 1547. 'A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Health' was one of the earliest treatises on the cultivation of health composed in England and stressed the importance of sanitation together with a detailed examination of diet. The 'Brevyary of Health' listed diseases alphabetically together with remedies and treatment, blending sound medical advice with religion and superstition: its companion volume was 'The Principles of Astronomy'. But Boorde's 'Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge' was his tour-de-force; it was a comprehensive encyclopaedia of all the European countries he had visited, illustrated by woodcuts. By 1547 Boorde was settled in England, probably Master of the Hospital of St Giles-in-the-Fields in London but by 1549 he was living the life of a recluse in Winchester. Tortured by guilt at his perceived lack of religious integrity and persecuted by his enemies he died in the Fleet prison amid rumors that he had poisoned himself.