9 weird medieval medicines

9 weird medieval medicines


http://www.historyextra.com/article/medieval/9-weird-medieval-medicines


Just as we do today, people in the medieval period worried about their health and what they might do to ward off sickness, or alleviate symptoms if they did fall ill. Here, historian Toni Mount reveals some of the most unusual remedies commonly used…
Monday 20th April 2015
Submitted by: Emma McFarnon
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Anatomical chart of the human body, from 15th-century Tractatabus de Pestilentia (Treatise on Plague) © The Art Archive / Alamy


Medicines in the medieval period were sometimes homemade, if they weren’t too complicated. Simple medicines consisted of a single ingredient – usually a herb – but if they required numerous ingredients or preparation in advance, they could be purchased from an apothecary, rather like a modern pharmacist.

Although some medical remedies were quite sensible, others were extraordinarily weird. They all now come with a health warning, so it’s probably best not to try these at home...


1) St Paul’s Potion for epilepsy, catalepsy and stomach problems

Supposedly invented by St Paul, this potion was to be drunk. The extensive list of ingredients included liquorice, sage, willow, roses, fennel, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, cormorant blood, mandrake, dragon’s blood and three kinds of pepper.

Although this sounds like a real witch’s brew, most of the ingredients do have some medicinal value: liquorice is good for the chest – it was and continues to be used to treat coughs and bronchitis; sage is thought to improve blood flow to the brain and help one’s memory, and willow contains salicylic acid, a component of aspirin. Fennel, cinnamon and ginger are all carminatives (which relieve gas in the intestines), and would relieve a colicky stomach.

Cormorant blood – or that of any other warm-blooded creature – would add iron for anaemia; mandrake, although poisonous, is a good sleeping draught if used in small doses, and, finally, dragon’s blood. This isn’t blood at all, and certainly not from a mythical beast! It is the bright red resin of the tree Dracaena draco – a species native to Morocco, Cape Verde and the Canary Islands. Modern research has shown that it has antiseptic, antibiotic, anti-viral and wound-healing properties, and it is still used in some parts of the world to treat dysentery – but I’m not sure it could have done anything for epileptics or cataleptics.


2) A good medicine for sciatica [pain caused by irritation or compression of the sciatic nerve, which runs from the back of your pelvis, all the way down both legs]

A number of medieval remedies suggested variations of the following: “Take a spoonful of the gall of a red ox and two spoonfuls of water-pepper and four of the patient’s urine, and as much cumin as half a French nut and as much suet as a small nut and break and bruise your cumin.

Then boil these together till they be like gruel then let him lay his haunch bone [hip] against the fire as hot as he may bear it and anoint him with the same ointment for a quarter of an hour or half a quarter, and then clap on a hot cloth folded five or six times and at night lay a hot sheet folded many times to the spot and let him lie still two or three days and he shall not feel pain but be well.”

Perhaps it was the bed rest and heat treatments that did the trick, because I can’t see the ingredients of the ointment doing much good otherwise!


3) For burns and scalds

“Take a live snail and rub its slime against the burn and it will heal”

A nice, simple DIY remedy – and yes, it would help reduce blistering and ease the pain! Recent research has shown that snail slime contains antioxidants, antiseptic, anaesthetic, anti-irritant, anti-inflammatory, antibiotic and antiviral properties, as well as collagen and elastin, vital for skin repair.

Modern science now utilises snail slime, under the heading ‘Snail Gel’, as skin preparations and for treating minor injuries, such as cuts, burns and scalds. It seems that medieval medicine got this one right.


4) For a stye on the eye

“Take equal amounts of onion/leek [there is still debate about whether ‘cropleek’, as stated in the original recipe, in Bald’s Leechbook, is equivalent to an onion or leek today] and garlic, and pound them well together. Take equal amounts of wine and bull’s gall and mix them with the onion and garlic. Put the mixture in a brass bowl and let it stand for nine nights, then strain it through a cloth. Then, about night-time, apply it to the eye with a feather.”

Would this Anglo-Saxon recipe have done any good? The onion, garlic and bull’s gall all have antibiotic properties that would have helped a stye – an infection at the root of an eyelash.

The wine contains acetic acid which, over the nine days, would react with the copper in the brass bowl to form copper salts, which are bactericidal. Recently, students at Nottingham University made up and tested this remedy: at first, the mixture made the lab smell like a cook shop, with garlic, onions and wine, but over the nine days the mixture developed into a stinking, gloopy goo. Despite its unpromising odour and appearance, the students tested it for any antibiotic properties and discovered that it is excellent. The recipe is now being further investigated as a treatment against the antibiotic-resistant MRSA bug, and it looks hopeful.

The ancient apothecary was right about this remedy, but it was one that needed to be prepared in advance for sale over the counter.



The apothecary's shop. From Johannis de Cuba Ortus Sanitatis, Strasbourg, 1483. © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy


5) For gout

“Take an owl and pluck it clean and open it, clean and salt it. Put it in a new pot and cover it with a stone and put it in an oven and let it stand till it be burnt. And then stamp [pound] it with boar’s grease and anoint the gout therewith.”

Poor owl! I can’t think that this would have helped the patient very much either…


6) For migraines

“Take half a dish of barley, one handful each of betony, vervain and other herbs that are good for the head; and when they be well boiled together, take them up and wrap them in a cloth and lay them to the sick head and it shall be whole. I proved.”

Betony [a grassland herb] was used by the medieval and Tudor apothecary as an ingredient in remedies to be taken internally for all kinds of ailments, as well as in poultices for external use, as in this case. Modern medicine still makes use of the alkaloid drugs found in betony for treating severe headaches and migraine.

Vervain’s glycoside [a class of molecules in which, a sugar molecule is bonded to a ‘non-sugar’ molecule] derivatives too are used in modern treatments for migraine, depression and anxiety, so once again the apothecary knew what he was doing with this recipe!

7) For him that has quinsy [a severe throat infection]

“Take a fat cat and flay it well, clean and draw out the guts. Take the grease of a hedgehog and the fat of a bear and resins and fenugreek and sage and gum of honeysuckle and virgin wax. All this crumble small and stuff the cat within as you would a goose. Roast it all and gather the grease and anoint him [the patient] with it.”

With treatments like this, is it any wonder that a friend wrote to Pope Clement VI when he was sick, c1350, to say: “I know that your bedside is besieged by doctors and naturally this fills me with fear… they learn their art at our cost and even our death brings them experience.”


8) To treat a cough

“Take the juice of horehound to be mixed with diapenidion and eaten”

Horehound [a herb plant and member of the mint family] is good for treating coughs, and diapenidion is a confection made of barley water, sugar and whites of eggs, drawn out into threads – so perhaps a cross between candy floss and sugar strands. It would have tasted nice, and sugar is good for the chest – still available in an over-the-counter cough mixture as linctus simplex.


9) For the stomach

“To void wind that is the cause of colic, take cumin and anise, of each equally much, and lay it in white wine to steep, and cover it over with wine and let it stand still so three days and three nights. And then let it be taken out and laid upon an ash board for to dry nine days and be turned about. And at the nine days’ end, take and put it in an earthen pot and dry over the fire and then make powder thereof. And then eat it in pottage or drink it and it shall void the wind that is the cause of colic”

Both anise and cumin are carminatives, so this medicine would do exactly what it said on the tin – or earthen pot. The herbs dill and fennel could be used instead to the same effect – 20th-century gripe water for colicky babies contained dill.

This remedy would have taken almost two weeks to make, so patients would have bought it from the apothecary, as needed.

Toni Mount is an author, historian and history teacher. She began her career working in the laboratories of the then-Wellcome pharmaceutical company [now GlaxoSmithKline], and gained her MA studying a 15th-century medical text at the Wellcome Library. She is also a member of the Research Committee of the Richard III Society.

Her books, all published by Amberley, include Everyday Life in Medieval London: From the Anglo-Saxons to the Tudors; The Medieval Housewife & Other Women of the Middle Ages and her latest book, Dragon’s Blood & Willow Bark: The Mysteries of Medieval Medicine, which is out now.
Article Type: | Medieval | Social history | United Kingdom | Weird and wonderful | Feature | health | BBC History Magazine |

Ancient Greek healthcare: as contentious as today?

Ancient Greek healthcare: as contentious as today?


http://www.historyextra.com/blog/ancient-greece/ancient-greek-healthcare-contentious-today

Thursday 13th May 2010
Submitted by: Michael Scott

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America has just voted through its biggest health-care reform in decades. But what was medical treatment like in ancient Greece?

Ancient Greece was, first and foremost, a world full of gods – gods who determined much of people’s lives. So, it will come as no surprise that when ancient Greeks were ill, they often believed a god was responsible for the illness. Epilepsy, for example, was known simply in ancient Greece as the Sacred Disease.

In search for a cure, the Greeks also turned to the gods – either in an effort to appease the god who have caused their illness or to the god of healing, Asclepius, who they hoped would cure them.

The great sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros – which so many people still visit today for its magnificent theatre – was one of the sanctuaries to the god of healing built during the early part of the 4th century BC. People would come to the temple in the sanctuary and pay a fee to the priests to sleep there, hoping the god would come to them in a dream and cure them, or tell them how they could be cured.

But, over time, the god-cure route stopped being the only option. During the 4th century BC, the development of medical knowledge about the human body, and about human illness started to take off.

Hippocratus, for example, whose Hippocratic oath doctors still swear today, was making his investigations of the human body and human disease at just this time and offering alternative practical remedies to many problems that did not depend on the gods.

The sacred disease, it is argued in the Hippocratic corpus of medical writing, had nothing to do with the gods, but had human causes and human solutions. The era of scientific medicine had begun.

By the end of the 4th century BC, the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros may have been genuinely worried about the threat this new ‘medicine’ posed to its flow of ‘customers’. The sanctuary responded by commissioning a whole series of ‘success stories’ to be written up on stone and displayed at the sanctuary.

Those ‘stories on stone’ have survived to today and make fascinating reading. The god is claimed to have helped a woman pregnant for 5 years to give birth, to have cured wounds that had seeped pus for years, to have given the dumb back their voice and even the bald their hair. It seems that, even in ancient Greece, there was disagreement about who provided better healthcare.

Reprinted from Neos Kosmos www.neoskosmos.com

【科學史上的今天】12/31——維薩留斯誕辰（Andreas Vesalius, 1514－1564）

【科學史上的今天】12/31——維薩留斯誕辰（Andreas Vesalius, 1514－1564）

1536 年的一個午夜，月黑風高，比利時魯汶（Leuven）城內的絞刑架上猶懸掛著一具已被處決的屍體，在風中微微晃動。驀地黑影一閃，一個人影潛行到絞刑架 旁，再次確定四下無人後，將這無人認領的死屍盜走。他將屍體運到一處空屋內，置於大木桌上，點起油燈，按耐住興奮之情，手起刀落，一刀劃開死者的胸膛。

偷屍人與死者沒有血海深仇，也並非甚麼變態狂魔，事實上，他可是剛從巴黎大學畢業的醫學生──維薩留斯。未來他將剖開更多屍體，發表鉅著糾正流傳千年的錯誤醫學知識，而被後世尊稱為「解剖學之父 」。

出生於布魯塞爾的維薩留斯原本就在魯汶大學念美術，但因為對人體結構的強烈興趣而前往巴黎大學就讀。但課程內容讓他大失所望，教授還是拿著西元二世 紀的蓋倫（Galen）的著作照本宣科，偶而拿貓狗之類的動物屍體來解剖講解，而且操刀的還是劊子手或理髮師，教授與學生自己都不動手，因為那不是高尚的 人應做的事。

然而蓋倫的著作其實錯誤百出，因為他基於宗教信仰，根本從未解剖過人體。他所寫的人體器官與內部構造都是根據解剖豬、狗、猴等動物而來，他關於生命 的主張與理論仍是延續希臘哲學家的觀點，但他仍成為一千多年來唯一的醫學權威，他的著作也成為不容懷疑的經典教科書。但維薩留斯就是無法忍受不能觀察實體 以驗證教學內容，他想親眼看見人體的血脈骨骼，他想親手觸摸內部每個器官，他要知道它們彼此如何連結，他渴望掌握人體的奧秘。

我們不知道維薩留斯究竟偷偷解剖了多少屍體，但肯定已技巧熟練並知識豐富到讓他第二年到正值文藝復興的義大利後，就能在一年內拿到醫學博士，並隨既 被聘任為教授。當地一位法官相當肯定維薩留斯的研究，特許他解剖被處決的罪犯屍體，維薩留斯得以前所未有的教學方式公開解剖屍體，讓學生圍繞一旁學習，並 鼓勵學生不要盡信書，應親自動刀驗證維薩留斯自己所教的是否有誤。

1543 年，未滿四十歲的維薩留斯出版了經典鉅著《人體的結構》，他發揮之前的美術專長，親手繪製栩栩如生的人體插圖，詳實呈現肌理、血脈、內臟、骨骼，甚至大腦 的樣貌，糾正了人們長久以來的錯誤醫學知識（例如人的感官知覺並非由心臟掌管，而是大腦）。很巧地，這一年哥白尼也在臨終前終於出版了《天體運行論》，以 「日心說」推翻了千年以來認為地球是宇宙中心的謬誤觀念。這兩本書一是對內的探索、一是對外的探索，改變了我們對人體與天體的認知，使得 1543 年成為科學史上極具意義的一年。

只是他也與哥白尼一樣並未馬上獲得當世的認同與尊崇。據傳維薩留斯因為被人指稱他所解剖的屍體仍有心跳，而被判流放海外，最後喪身於希臘附近的一座小島。