[2] John of Gaddesden was also a Roman Catholic theologian, a fellow at Merton College, Oxford, a physician for members of the British royal family, and one of the most celebrated medical authorities of his time.
[2] His medical works, alongside those of Gilbertus Anglicus, "formed part of the core curriculum that underpinned the practice of medicine for the next 400 years".
It is crammed with quotations from Galen, Pedanius Dioscorides, Rufus of Ephesus, Haliabbas, Serapion, Al Rhazis, Avicenna, Averroes, John of Damascus, Isaac, Masawaiyh, Gilbertus Anglicus, and from the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum; but also contains a good many original remarks which illustrate the character of the author more than his medical knowledge.
He cared for his gains, and boasts of getting a large price from the Barber surgeons' guild for a prescription of which the chief ingredient is tree frogs (Rosa, ed.
Gaddesden was in priest's orders, and was appointed to the stall of Wildland in St Paul's Cathedral, London, on 1 Aug 1342.
This account contains the error, repeated by John Aikin's Biographical Memoirs of Medicine, 1780, p. 11, that he held the stall of Ealdland.