Baking a salted owl and grinding it into powder to deal with gout is likely one of the weird recommendations discovered amongst 1000’s of medieval medical treatments.
Stuffing a pet with snail and sage, roasting it over a hearth and utilizing the fats to make a salve, is one other urged gout remedy.
Someone affected by cataracts lots of of years in the past can be suggested to combine the gall bladder of a hare with some honey and use a feather to use it to their eye.
The remedies are amongst 8,000 medical recipes contained in 180 medieval manuscripts – principally relationship to the 14th or fifteenth centuries – which might be being digitised by the Cambridge University Library.
However, some date again even earlier, with one being 1,000 years previous.
They additionally give an perception into the violence of medieval life, with recommendation on the way to uncover if a cranium has been fractured after a weapon harm, in addition to the way to set damaged bones and cease bleeding.
Some include detailed illustrations and present docs used a “bewildering array of ingredients” – animal, vegetable and mineral, stated undertaking chief Dr James Freeman.
“For all their complexities, medieval medical recipes are very relatable to modern readers,” he stated.
“Many handle illnesses that we nonetheless battle with at present: complications, toothache, diarrhoea, coughs, aching limbs.
“They show medieval people trying to manage their health with the knowledge that was available to them at the time – just as we do.”
Dr Freeman added: “They are also a reminder of the pain and precarity of medieval life, before antibiotics, before antiseptics and before pain relief as we would know them all today.
“Other remedies embody salting an owl and baking it till it may be floor right into a powder, mixing it with boar’s grease to make a salve, and rubbing it onto the sufferer’s physique to remedy gout.”
The texts come from a dozen Cambridge schools, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the University Library, and are being preserved as a part of the £500,000 Curious Cures undertaking.
Full transcriptions of the treatments and high-res pictures will likely be made freely obtainable within the Cambridge Digital Library as cataloguers work by the texts over the subsequent two years.
Source: information.sky.com”