23rd August 2020

 It’s commonly believed that 1,000 years ago, medicine in Europe consisted of hanging toads around the neck and muttering incantations.  'Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...'

In fact,  Anglo-Saxon healers were recommending that women shouldn’t eat salty foods,  take vigorous exercise, or drink alcohol during pregnancy. Just as we do today.

And that a man, wounded in the stomach during battle should be sewn up with silk, as that dissolves in time, as do modern sutures.

 Bald’s Laege Book also known as Bald’s Leech Book was written in Anglo-Saxon, possibly in the time of King Alfred the Great.  In this case, ‘Leech’ is from the Danish ‘Laege’ or healer, physician.  

 

 From a facsimile of Bald's book.

In 2015,  academics at Nottingham University decided to duplicate some of Bald’s remedies and see if they were as effective as claimed. 

They chose one for a stye, a bacterial infection of the eyelid, making up the medicine as faithfully as possible, bearing in mind that today’s herbs and vegetable differ substantially from those grown in 890.

 

They gathered garlic, crop leek, bull’s gall and wine and followed the instructions, which included leaving the potion in a copper pot for 9 days.

When the medieval potion was completed, the academics did laboratory tests and discovered it was such a powerful anti-bacterial that it killed Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) every bit as effectively as the pharmaceutical sold for that purpose.

 There are notes In Bald’s Laege Book  which indicate plastic surgery was tried for a cleft-palate.

The word ‘plastic’ in this context is nothing to do with the ubiquitous polymer the world is currently demonising but from the Greek plastikos - to mould or form.

 They also tried knee and hip surgery back in the woefully mis-named Dark Ages, as archaeologist have been able to show.

 

Other remedies in Bald’s include  a daily goblet of wine into which a red hot iron spike has been plunged,  as a cure for an enlarged spleen.  As this ailment can be due to iron deficiency, adding iron to the wine was wise.

  As was using Buck’s liver, rich in Vitamin A, for,  ‘those who cannot see well beyond sunset and until the sun once more rises’ - we call it ‘night blindness’,  which can be cause by a lack of that vitamin.

 Even the incantations may not be as off the wall as they seem. In a world with no clocks, how else might you time how long a poultice had to be left on the skin?

If something had to be taken three times a day, listen for the church bells ringing for Lauds, early morning, then again for Prime as the sun rose and Vespers in the evening.  

What better way to remember when to take your medicine along with the appropriate prayers?  Prayers which were believed to help the remedy work through God’s grace.  

 We are still timing things today.  Apparently, if you play Simon and Garfunkle’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ it is exactly long enough to boil an egg..... and how many of us have sung  Happy Birthday as we washed our hands?

That’s not much different from saying the Paternoster whilst holding a cold compress to the bruised eye of an Anglo-Saxon lad who’s been fighting with his friends.