All Things Medieval

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.

Natural magic was inseparable from what we’d consider “real” herbal lore. Since the chemistry of why some plants were medicinal was very, very far out of reach, “that’s just how its natural magic works” was the best explanation.

In pre-Christian times, natural magic didn’t cause any philosophical problems. In some religious systems, God is in everything, not separate from creation. In others, the plants are effective because using them is a supplication to some god to help. But for the early European Christians, the use of magic posed a dilemma. What was okay and what was not?

Most of what we know is from penance manuals, the books sent out into the field for priests to use at confession. Sins were carefully defined and, in a sense, rated or scored by how much penance was required. Calling on the pagan gods was obviously a sin, but many charms could be Christianized by calling on angels and saints, instead. I’ll have examples of these in future essays.

Using a plant in a direct way was never considered the wrong kind of natural magic. Plants were crushed, steeped, strained, and burned. They were mixed with wine, water, butter or other substances. Sometimes even animals were used for direct use in medicine, burning some or all of an animal and using the ashes. As long as the remedy went directly onto the wound or into the patient, it was fine.

The church was less comfortable with indirect use of plants, for example, to tie a bunch of leaves with a red string to the patient’s forehead. Some of the rules for using plants were right on the border, such as not using iron to cut or dig. Since chemistry was not understood (after all, using a copper or iron dish did make a difference in how a brew turned out), it was allowed. What about picking a plant only at dawn or midnight? Well, perhaps its virtues fluctuate with the day’s cycle. Who knows? When there was doubt, it was best to say the Our Father or invoke a saint, to be safe.

Everyone agreed on the basic principle of sympathy: similar appearance indicated that a plant (or, sometimes, animal) could treat a problem. If a plant’s flower looked like a snake’s head, it could probably cure snake venom. Garlic was good for spear wounds because the garlic bulb was shaped roughly like a spear-head (“gar” was spear in Anglo-Saxon). Jaundice was treated with plants that were yellow; tree bark could help with skin ailments.

Oddly, everyone also agreed that minerals had properties of natural magic. The lodestone pointed north, which was certainly natural magic, so why would not coral protect its wearer from lightning? Every gemstone had properties like this; one of the standard types of book listed the minerals and what they could do.

Thomas Aquinas, probably speaking for everyone in the Middle Ages, stated that all natural magic properties were caused by the stars’ influence on the earth. Astrology and astronomy were still one science in that time. Most of their lore came from the East, so it had a particularly exotic, scientific sheen.

In the Middle Ages, what was disease? Everyone agreed that health was wholeness: it was the body functioning as it ought to. I guess our contemporary writers who talk about “wellness” are taking a similar view. So loss of health meant that something had been taken away; it needed to be restored.

Loss of health had two primary, concrete causes: imbalance and some kind of attack, a direct theft of health.

Imbalance of humors was the Greco-Roman theory, imported to Northern Europe first with the Roman legions, then with the monastic tradition that was heavily based on Latin sources. Their answer to the question “why am I sick?” was that you ingested some substance that imbalanced your system, or else you have an inherent humor-balancing problem.

The substance was probably food: you ate too many cold and wet foods, which cooled the fires of the stomach, so that food was not properly digested. The body tried to remedy the situation by heating you up. That’s why you have a fever. Or perhaps you ate foods that were too warm or dry for your system. Maybe you were greedy at a feast and glutted yourself on spiced wine; perhaps you could not hold back from eating far too many roast birds.

Bad air might also imbalance your system. Air near the sea was cool and wet, while in low inland places it was warm and wet. We’ve often remarked from the standpoint of current knowledge of mosquito-borne illness that “bad air” most often had mosquitos whining about, although this connection was not made at the time. When people traveled to foreign places, they often came home sick, which was obviously caused by bad air or unfamiliar air that imbalanced a traveler’s system even if it was okay for the inhabitants.

The native Germanic idea of illness seemed to focus most on attacks. Your health was stolen, or something pierced your body and brought unwholeness to it.

In pre-Christian times, the attackers were often elves and dwarves. These creatures lived a life apart from mankind, in woodlands or in mountains and caves (respectively). They were not considered evil. They were just dangerous because they took no care for mankind or might be angered. Elves shot arrows, so sudden attacks of illness, especially if it appeared localized with swelling or a wound, were viewed as elf-shot attacks.

Another type of attack came from a worm. This included literal parasites, as well as imaginary evil serpents. But just as cancer is named for the microscopic crabs they thought were eating the flesh, other illnesses could be caused by invisible worms.

It would simplify things too much to reduce all illness to imbalance and outside attacks; there seems to have been also a general awareness that illness just happens. However, it was still a loss: a loss of balance or wholeness. Plants might restore what was lost, or charms might induce the loss to be reversed.

In early medical books, diseases and remedies were organized from head to foot. This suggests, too, that the illness was generally seen as localized. Disorders like diabetes and gout, which stem from internal organs but show up in limbs or eyes, were out of their reckoning. How much comprehension there was in the linkage of symptoms depends a lot on the place, time, and chain of influence among writers.

When the Celtic and Germanic tribes of Europe converted to Roman Christianity, they adopted a long-established written tradition of scientific principles. Their own herb lore continued, probably in many cases without reference to the new “science.” But it became, increasingly, the medicine of the countryside and the poor. Aristocrats wanted medical men trained in the Roman sciences.

The first underlying principle of Greco-Roman medicine was that each person is unique, in health as well as in sickness. We’re slowly coming back to partial acceptance of this idea with DNA definitions of how people differ. However, for a long time, one of our bedrock ideas has been that healthy people are fundamentally alike, and the diseases that make sick people different are also fundamentally alike. We deal in forests, not trees.

Greco-Roman medical practice identified diseases, but it focused more on balancing the four humors that every person was made of. In that one way people were alike, I suppose: they were made up of the same four elements, though in different combinations. The essence of disease was imbalance.

The physical world was already divided into earth, air, water, and fire. The body was similarly made of liquids that corresponded to these four elements. To a Roman doctor, we are made of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Every healthy person had a personal balance of these liquids, and every disease showed itself in signs of imbalance of humors.

The physical world also could be defined by the attributes of heat and water, and lack of heat (coldness) and of water (dryness). The four humors could be described in these terms also. Blood was hot and wet, while phlegm was cold and wet. The two kinds of bile were both perceived as dry; the black bile was additionally cold.

A healthy man could be defined by the humors that dominated in his system. If he was sanguine, it meant literally that he was full of blood. It would be considered normal for him to feel too warm frequently, and to be optimistic. Blood corresponded to air, which was warm and dry. The phlegmatic man had too much phlegm and was cold and wet, like water; he was resistant to action. The melancholy man had more black bile and was both cold and dry, like earth. The choleric man had yellow bile, was warm and dry, and got angry easily, like fire.

When doctors prescribed, they had to take into account the patient’s fundamental system as well as his symptoms of imbalance. Fever was a hot, dry symptom; diseases characterized by fever, like measles, were hot, drying disorders. They needed to be cooled and watered, to bring the system into balance again. A choleric man with a fever needed extra consideration; the fever might be a result of his system having cooled too much, so instead of cooling and hydrating, he might need more warming and drying.

The Greco-Roman system had the great advantage of logic. It organized everything neatly in basically one 2 by 2 table. Our culture may have a tendency to love binary options so much that we simply cannot resist a binary split by another binary.

The drawback was that the system had no factual basis; it was all theory.