The world's oldest medical text is a clay tablet from Ur inscribed some 4,000 years ago. The oldest surviving Egyptian medical text is the Kahun papyrus, which was written about 150 years later. The oldest surviving Greek texts are copies of the writings of Hippocrates of Cos, who flourished about 400 BC and was contemporary with Socrates and Plato. Copies of later Greek and Latin medical texts are plentiful, including the three volumes of the works of Celsus in Latin and the twenty volumes of the works of Galen in Greek. The result is that we have a very fair sample of the medical lore of the Mediterranean world from a very early date. But before 1100 north of the Alps only one culture has left us anything of its own; uniquely among Northern Europeans the Anglo-Saxons appear from early times to have written medical texts in their own language as well as in Latin, and enough of these have survived from the tenth century and later to give us a good picture of what medicine was like in a northern country in medieval times.

Their Latin texts are almost entirely copies, or direct derivatives, of Latin ones originating in the Mediterranean regions of Europe, Asia and North Africa, and so are of greatest interest in showing the contacts between the Anglo-Saxons and the cultures of those regions. On the other hand, the surviving Old English texts are unique among European medical records.