Lots of of Medieval Medical Manuscripts with Unusual Cures Get Digitized & Put On-line: From Leeches to Crushed Weasel Testicles

If any dis­cus­sion of medieval med­i­cine will get going, it’s solely a mat­ter of time earlier than some­one brings up leech­es. And it seems that the cen­tral­i­ty of these squirm­ing blood-suck­ers to the deal with­ment of dis­ease within the Mid­dle Ages isn’t a lot over­stat­ed, at the least judg­ing by a glance via Curi­ous Cures. A Properly­come Analysis Sources Award-fund­ed challenge of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge Libraries, it has current­ly fin­ished con­serv­ing, dig­i­tiz­ing, and mak­ing avail­in a position on-line 190 man­u­scripts con­tain­ing greater than 7,000 pages of medieval med­ical recipes. These books con­tain a wealth of infor­ma­tion even past the textual content on their pages: a mul­ti-spec­tral imag­ing analy­sis of certainly one of them, for examination­ple, revealed that it was as soon as owned by a cer­tain “Thomas Phrase, leche” — or leech, i.e., a heal­er who made inten­sive use of the instruments you would possibly imag­ine.

Not that the prac­tice of medieval med­i­cine got here down to use­ing leech­es and noth­ing extra. In the person­u­scripts dig­i­tized by Curi­ous Cures (which embrace not simply strict­ly med­ical texts but additionally bibles, legislation texts, and books of hours), one finds a gained­der­land of dove feces, fox lungs, salt­ed owl, eel grease, weasel tes­ti­cles, fast­sil­ver (i.e. mer­cury) — a gained­der­land for learn­ers curi­ous about medieval types of knowl­edge, if not for the actu­al sufferers who needed to beneath­go these dubi­ous deal with­ments.

However as any schol­ar of the sub­ject could be fast to remind us, med­ical doc­u­ments within the Mid­dle Ages could have wan­ton­ly blended people and “offi­cial” knowl­edge, however they had been laborious­ly repos­i­to­ries of pure tremendous­sti­tion: fairly, they rep­re­despatched the very best efforts of intel­li­gent peo­ple to beneath­stand their very own bod­ies and the world they inhab­it­ed, with­within the dom­i­nant world­view of their time and place.

That was a time by which well being was considered deter­mined by the “4 humors,” black bile, yel­low bile, blood and phlegm; a time when cer­tain elements of vegetation or ani­mals had been believed to be in “sym­pa­thet­ic” cor­re­spon­dence with cer­tain elements of the human physique; a time when repeat­ed­ly pray­ing whereas clip­ping one’s fin­ger­nails, then bury­ing these clip­pings in an elder tree, may plau­si­bly treatment a toothache. And now, it’s eas­i­er than ever to get a way of what it should have been like, because of Curi­ous Cures’ tran­scribed, trans­lat­ed, and search­in a position archive of all these man­u­scripts. The extra out­landish reme­dies apart, what’s comment­in a position is how these books additionally acknowl­edge the impor­tance of what we’d now name a great evening’s sleep, reg­u­lar exer­cise, and a bal­anced, var­ied weight loss plan. Medievals could have beneath­stood their very own well being wager­ter than we imag­ine, however regard­much less, we’re prob­a­bly not deliver­ing again leechcraft any­time quickly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Urine Wheels in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Dis­cov­er the Curi­ous Diag­nos­tic Device Utilized by Medieval Doc­tors

Behold the Medieval Wound Man: The Poor Soul Who Illus­trat­ed the Accidents a Per­son May Obtain By means of Battle, Acci­dent or Dis­ease

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often called Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.