Richard Rolle (c.1300–49), an extremely influential English hermit and religious writer, was certainly not a medical doctor. Yet, this fact often results in a form of critical misapprehension which views Rolle’s use of medical language as simply rhetorical ornament or flourish. As this talk will demonstrate, when Rolle asserts that his Psalter commentary is a ‘medicine of words’, he is not being arch or superficially clever. Rather, he is drawing upon widespread cultural understandings regarding the very definition of health, and the medicinal potential of the act of reading itself.