Late medieval medical texts bear witness to a coherent and complex construct of the eye and its function, and a well-developed typology of ocular dysfunctions identified with an array of diagnostic tools. Fourteenth-century medical and surgical treatments for visual impairment, on the other hand, remain somewhat limited: with ointments and dietary regimens comprising the bulk of therapeutic options, surgeries and eyeglasses are relegated to a last resort. In other words, while late medieval medical theorists have elaborated a standard physiological model of the eye, medical and surgical practitioners have a relatively narrow range of therapies at their disposal, among which those with the greatest potential for effectiveness – eyeglasses and surgery – remain controversial and, in the latter case, high-risk. In the face of such a gap between theory and practice, between diagnosis and cure, there is ample space for a different sort of remedy altogether, a rhetorically based cure that enables its practitioners to explore the therapeutic potential of high-risk treatments without realizing their potential for bodily damage. These poetic experimentations with remedies for blindness range from verbalized variations on medical treatments to radical departures from contemporary practice.