All Things Medieval

I’m passing over many remedies in Leechcraft that follow a sensible, generic pattern: “take these 3 herbs and boil them in wine, let the patient drink it.” “Boil this herb in butter, mix in another herb, apply to wound.” Many of them sound plausible. Another generic pattern is a long list of herbs to be ground together and mixed into butter as a heal-all salve. This, too, sounds at least plausible. There are simply so many of these remedies that unless readers wanted to know about a particular ailment, such as breaking up stones in the bladder, I don’t want to write about them. Of course, the risk of seeking out the interesting ones is that it may distort the overall picture of traditional medicine in the early Middle Ages.

Remedies for dangerous bites stand out from general wound care. There is more attention to snake bites in the Herbarium, which was compiled in Anglo-Saxon from Latin sources. Bald’s Leechbook is more interested in bites of spiders and dogs. However, the Herbarium addresses rabies in particular: the bite of a mad dog. It probably didn’t work, but it’s interesting.

The remedy is in an entry for the herb ashthroat, which may be the herb now called verbena or vervain. It is first prescribed for hardening of the arteries, stones in the bladder, liver disease, and wound care. Its use in snake-bite and spider-bite is unremarkable, following the generic pattern of boiling pounded twigs and leaves in wine, and applying it to the wound.

For the bite of a mad dog, the verbena (probably crushed) is mixed with an equal amount of wheat seeds. This mixture is laid into the open wound. The wheat is there to absorb moisture, probably to draw out the venom. When it appears to be swelled up with moisture, it is removed from the wound and tossed to the chickens. This is a test: will the chickens eat it? If the chickens refuse to touch it, the procedure must be repeated with fresh verbena and wheat until all toxicity is gone.

I don’t know what to make of this test. They seem to assume that chickens can sense the infection in the grain. Or is this just a test of how successfully the wound is being drained at all? Will chickens avoid grain that has gotten blood on it? This seems unlikely to me; the chickens I’ve known don’t mind picking each other bloody. Has anyone in the last 1000 years tried it, or has this chicken lore died out? My father, an amateur chicken farmer, didn’t know either. The internet is only interested in whether chickens can get rabies (answer: no, but isolated cases happen).

Other Herbarium entries recommended for the bite of a mad dog are used in conventional ways, just laid into the wound plain or infused in wine. Only this one treatment has the chicken test.

Bald’s Leechbook suggests using houndstooth, or houndstongue, to treat dog bite. This plant is toxic to cattle because its natural insecticides are so powerful. It has a long history in herb lore; it was regularly used in medicine into the modern age, decocted into various brews and teas. But it’s likely that its use for dog-bite is mostly due to its leaves being shaped like a dog’s tongue. Natural magic’s first principle was that anything shaped like the body part or attacker could help with the ailment.

Toothache must have been a frequent problem in medieval times. With our standard of dental care, we lose awareness of just how chronic and potentially dangerous tooth problems can be. From chronic minor tooth pain (the sort that gets “referred” to other teeth so you don’t know where it’s coming from) to lethal infections, teeth were a never-ending problem.

Bald’s Leechbook suggests chewing pepper for toothache. When Bald’s book was compiled in the 11th century, this traded spice from southern India must have been restricted to castle cooking and medicinal use. Would pepper help with teeth? It might; it has antibiotic properties.

Medieval herbal and traditional remedies come mainly from native Celtic or Germanic roots, not from the Greco-Roman tradition that they considered more scientific. And although only a few of the remedies include women in the actual recipe, they tell us something about traditional Europe’s attitude toward women. In a nutshell, women are good. They can mediate healing in ways that men can’t.

First, they produce milk. Breast milk turns up in five remedies, leaving it very unclear whether its use was “medical” in our sense, or magical. Other kinds of milk can be used in simple ways, as the base for active ingredients; “woman’s milk” is clearly a special ingredient, not just a base.

Bald’s book suggests using it as an eye drop or wash for growths on the eye, particularly the emergence of a “red sponge.” They’re almost certainly referring to a condition known as “Surfer’s Eye.” Every medieval fisherman can be considered a surfer, for these purposes. Being outdoors in the salt spray, with strong wind and bright sun, was very stressful for their eyes. Pterygium is a reddish or yellow growth that begins to cover the eye. It’s considered benign, but it can grow out over the cornea. It seems likely that many old fishermen, having survived storms and accidents, would be blind, and often from double-eye pterygium.

Pterygium in our time is treated with lubricating drops until it becomes urgent enough for surgery. Breast milk has some outstanding qualities, being sterile and filled with fat molecules. However, you’d think sheep’s milk (their most common dairy) would have the same qualities, and no other milk is recommended as an eye drop.

For “spots” on the eye, breast milk was used as a clean-up fluid after some rather nasty things were dropped into the eye. One of the ingredients has an uncertain translation; it could be sulfur. The other ingredients are burnt salt, and ink. They’re pulverized with a mortar and pestle and sprinkled into the eye, which is then washed up with a bit of wool dipped in water. Breast milk as eye drops come last, as a soothing wash.

Could breast milk have brought needed antibodies, as well as sterile water and fats? It’s possible, but it seems like giving them scientific credit in this case is too big a stretch. Breast milk probably is a good eye-drop at need. But after burnt salt and ink? Worse, there are two alternative eye drops suggested for the pterygium growth: hot pigeon’s or swallow’s blood. Again, it’s quite possible that blood would make a decent eye lubricant and perhaps help with disinfecting. When we see the requirement for pigeons and swallows, though, it sounds like magical thinking. “Birds have sharp eyes, so of course their blood is good for eyes.” The logic may have run a little bit differently, but not much. One of the basic principles of natural magic is that like treats like.

Breast milk also works as an ear-drop mixed with cilantro (coriander) juice. Like other ear-drops, it is first warmed in an oyster shell, which works as a tiny pitcher. Here again, we are left to wonder if its antibodies and white blood cells worked directly against infection.

As a fourth human-dairy product, the Lacnunga book has a very weird fever remedy: “take a snail, and cleanse it, and take the clean lather and mix it with a woman’s milk; give it to him to drink.” Just when we get to the remedy that suggests drinking the stuff, they include a snail.

Fifth and last, breast milk was a component of treating palsy of the face, perhaps what we’d call Bell’s Palsy. One way to treat the palsy was to source the problems to the ear; the mixture of cilantro/coriander and breast milk was again recommended. But for more extreme cases, the woman had to be nursing a baby boy, the leaves had to be dried before use, and the resulting mixture had to be applied to the paralyzed cheek with a blue cloth (and then dripped into the ear). There’s no other example of this “baby boy” reasoning, so we can only guess. Things seemed more magical if they crossed boundaries, so perhaps a woman’s milk being fed to a baby male seemed to combine something of both sexes.

Second, women can exert a powerful influence over nature by being virgins. Here, the “science or magic?” question is unnecessary. Let’s look at the prescription-virgin treatment for a cyst or swelling on the heart (and no, I don’t know how this would have been diagnosed without surgery). A cyst or swelling of some kind was called, in Anglo-Saxon, a wen.

“If wens ail a man at the heart: have a virgin go to a spring which runs straight eastwards and scoop one cup full out against the stream, and sing on it the Credo and Pater Noster and pour it then into another container; and….do likewise until you have three; do likewise for nine days; better will soon come to him.”

I think we can say with confidence that when this remedy was first used, Christian creeds and prayers were not the charms recited. Nine is not a significant number in Judeo-Christian tradition, but it is very significant in the Norse one. Odin hung on the world-tree, gaining secret runic knowledge, for nine days.  Many charms associated with Odin’s secret lore bring in 9’s. We’ll talk more about charms and runes in later entries.

What can we make of these remedies? If nothing else, it’s clear that women were considered a good influence on nature.

Source: Pollington, Leechcraft.

In the entries for eye salves, we first start to see an odd trend in these traditional remedies. While most of them use herbs, a few use fat or gall from animals. Is this medicine or magic?

Both of the leechbooks (lists of remedies in Anglo-Saxons) provide eye salves made from animals, and they are similar but not identical. Bald’s book has a very simple one: put fox’s fat into your eyes. In fact, do it every night for 30 nights as a general cure-all.

Bald’s book suggests another eye salve that sounds more difficult in every way. It starts with oil and a bumble-bee’s honey. Honey was often used to make medicines taste better or as a salve base, but this one specifies a wild bee whose honey is probably difficult to obtain. Into this base, add gall from a raven and a salmon.

Lacnunga has two similar salves. In one, the gall from a raven and a salmon are added to some herbs. A little “sharp juice” makes it a bit wetter, and it’s dropped into the eye through the medium of a piece of linen. In the other salve, bumble-bee’s honey forms the base, with fox fat and bone marrow from a roe deer.

It’s hard to know what to make of these directions from a modern view. It’s impossible to exclude an element of magic, since the bird must be a raven, not just any bird. Is the gallbladder of a raven distinct from others? It’s plausible that bile produced by seed-eating or worm-eating or scavenging birds is different, since they are digesting different things. What about bile from a salmon? I just don’t know.

It’s possible that there’s a unique chemical signature to the honey of the wild bumble-bee, as opposed to all of the wild or domesticated honey bees. Is it likely that this chemical is a break-through substance for treating eyes? It doesn’t seem likely.

It seems likeliest that the efficacy of the salves depended most on the ingredients being hard to obtain. It wasn’t hard to find bile from common farm animals, and pigs are known for production of fat, even in medieval times when pigs foraged for their own food. Foxes are lean creatures; even if you caught a fox and butchered it mainly for its fat, you’d have a small quantity. Same with salmon’s and ravens’ gallbladders or stomachs: small quantities, hard to obtain.

Bumble-bees do make honey, but there’s a reason they aren’t called honey bees. Honey bees stockpile honey for wintering over, but bumble-bees store only a few days’ worth of honey. It would take skill and patience even to find where it was stored, let alone bring it back.

In general, honey has some antibiotic properties, and bile is a mix of powerful chemicals. Ox gall, Wikipedia tells us, has cholesterol, lecithin, taurocholic acid, and glycocholic acid. The other kinds of bile might have any of six acids, which occur in the form of salts. Mixed into water, the salts break down into amino acids like taurine and cysteine.  Taurine crosses the blood-brain barrier and acts as an anti-oxidant; it is a component in today’s energy drinks.

So what happens when you take a bile from specific fish and birds, mix it with hard-to-obtain wild honey, and add fox fat? Really, anything could happen. it’s possible that some chemicals form powerful antibiotics. It’s also possible that representatives of air, land and water unite their magical powers to overwhelm flying venom. Until someone tests these substances, we won’t know.

As before, much thanks to Steve Pollington’s Leechcraft for these medicinal recipes.

In traditional pre-Christian European ideas, outside attacks caused many illnesses. This idea was probably considered primitive by Roman-trained doctors, who had a more scientific system based on imbalance of the body’s humors. In our time, we can see merit in both ideas.

One of the major sources of attack was the worm, or in Anglo-Saxon, “wyrm.” Again, I am leaning on Stephen Pollington’s Leechcraft to describe wyrm attacks. Pollington points out that wyrms could be snakes, dragons, parasitic worms, or some other invisible kind. (Earthworms had their own designation, renwyrm, and were not considered harmful. In fact, applying a crushed earthworm to some injuries was healing.) I’ll continue to use “wyrm,” their spelling, when it has this wider meaning than our “worm.”

The snake is one of the oldest mythological enemies of mankind. In addition to the Bible’s most ancient story of a serpent harming the first humans, the Indic and Hittite writings tell of first humans and heroes having to do battle against serpents. In contrast to the Bible’s story, in which the serpent wins the round and is rebuked directly only by God, the Indo-European myths portrayed the hero as the winner. The struggle might be to the death, as it is in Beowulf, but the hero slays the serpent.

The Anglo-Saxon medical directions and charms don’t distinguish what sort of wyrm might be attacking a patient. Some of the directions just mention wyrm attacks. Others specify that the wyrms are inside an organ, attacking it, which could mean parasitic worms. Of course, people in the past had ample evidence that worms really did attack humans. From tapeworms to ringworms to maggots, it was just fact.

One of the eye remedies in Bald’s collection is for wyrms in the eyes. We don’t know if they were visible worms, like maggots, or something invisible and presumed to be there.

The remedy for wyrms in the eye entails minor surgery. The doctor was to flip the eyelids up and lightly score them with his knife. Then he was to squeeze the juice of the plant celandine into the cuts. This, said the directions, would heal the whole problem. The wyrms would die, and the eye would heal.

Celandine is of the poppy family, and when its stem is cut, a yellow-orange latex oozes out. This juice has antibiotic and analgesic properties, but apparently if it’s put into a wound in this pure, strongest form, it’s highly irritating. In effect, it cauterizes the wound without any literal burning agent like a hot needle or knife.

Celandine has high amounts of an alkaloid called coptisine. The alkaloid is bitter and can be toxic to some kinds of cells. Coptisine used in Chinese medicine, though obtained from a different plant. While opium, also in the poppy family, has some coptisine, celandine apparently has much higher levels. Celandine has a number of other alkaloids, and in different strengths, it can be an analgesic. It may have anti-cancer effects as well.

Putting celandine in its strongest form into an eye that has already been scored with light cuts seems like a pretty radical and extremely painful treatment. Considering it in this light, it may have been used only when there was direct evidence that not only wyrms, but actually worms — maggots or some parasite — were present.

The Herbarium, a third manuscript with much Latin influence, suggests toning down the celandine’s effect by pounding its root with wine, and adding honey…and pepper. I can’t help thinking this one hurt pretty badly too. But if these remedies worked at all, which they probably did, any pain was better than going blind in a survival society. There was no room for error in that world; if any member of a family went blind, it might bring them all down. Next, I’ll look at eye salves that included some even more unusual ingredients.

Until more researchers at places like Nottingham University recreate Anglo-Saxon medicinal recipes, we won’t know if there are hidden secrets like the surprisingly effective antibiotic made from leeks and garlic. Some of the others sound possibly effective, now that we know one was. And some are just plainly no good, from our perspective.

The most outstanding no-good remedy involving a live bird tells us more about magical thinking than about medicine. How does the world work? What is permissible to do, in a quest for health? Does it matter if you know why it works?

The raven has special status in nearly all polytheistic/nature religions. In Norse religion, the raven was Odin’s special bird. Odin’s two ravens were named Thought and Memory. They flew through the world, bringing him back news. The Celts — Gauls, Britons and Welsh — who preceded the Germans in Europe also revered the raven. Ravens acted as messengers for their gods, too. According to Celtic legend, the Tower of London must be guarded by ravens. The raven’s special status must have been cemented by the Roman legions who occupied Celtic Europe. The cult of Mithras was the most popular religion at the time, and the raven represented a messenger god — and was one rank in initiation — here, too.

If the raven is a divine messenger, then its eyes matter a lot. It has to see what’s happening, right? I hope you can see where this is heading…or maybe I hope you can’t.

Eye infections often led to blindness, and blindness was a terrible disability in the Middle Ages. It was worth doing just about anything to avoid becoming blind. We feel that laboratory testing on animals is a legitimate act (most of us do anyway), and they felt that mutilating a raven was also just fine.

“Take a living raven, take the eyes out of it and, still living, bring it into water. Put the eyes on the neck of the man who needs them, and he will soon be well.” (Pollington, Leechcraft)

There’s no further explanation in Bald’s Leechbook. Immediately after this statement, the list turns to ten more remedies that don’t involve a mutilated living bird. As is generally true, the doctor’s training will help him know when to choose which remedies, so apart from the eyes being swollen, there is no guidance about which cases require a raven.

It’s likely that by Christian times, the raven’s eye remedy was rarely used, and it was only included for completeness. But we don’t know. It may have been viewed as the really effective (but rather extreme) remedy to be tried last when the herbs failed. It’s the only remedy of this type that I could find in the two texts. It’s very clearly magic, not medicine.

I don’t know any explanation for why the raven had to be put into water while its eyes were put onto the patient’s neck. Probably the bird had to be quickly drowned so that it could not take its eyes back, while the eyes were still living. Then the power was transferred to the human, as the bird died. It’s also possible that they had a whole program for teaching ravens to fly under water. If so, that experiment has been recreated in modern times, though it failed.