If a discussion on medieval medicine takes place, it is only a matter of time before someone talks about leeches. And it turns out that the centrality of these over -straps, wearing the treatment of the disease in the Middle Ages is not much overestimated, to judge by a look through Curious healing. WELLCOME Research Research Prize Project Research Resources of Libraries at the University of Cambridge, he recently completed conservation, digitization and provision online 190 manuscripts containing more than 7,000 pages of medieval medieval recipes. These books contain a wealth of information even beyond the text on their pages: a multiplelative imaging analysis of one of them, for example, revealed that it once belonged to a certain “word Thomas, Leche”-or bloody, that is to say a healer who made intensive use of the tools that you could imagine.
Not that the practice of medieval medicine comes down to applying leeches and nothing more. In manuscripts digitized by curious remedies (which includes not only strictly medical texts but also bibles, laws and Hours books), there is a land of wonders of dove excrement, fox lungs, salty owl, eel fat, belette testicles, quicksilver (that is to say mercury)-a land of wonders for curious readers of medieval forms of knowledge, if not for real patients who had to undergo these questionable treatments.
But as any scholar of the subject will not remind you, medical documents in the Middle Ages can have folk and “official” knowledge mixed, but they were hardly pure superstition benchmarks: they rather represent the best efforts of intelligent people to understand their own body and the world they lived, in the dominant global vision of their time and their place.
It was a time when health was considered determined by the “four moods”, black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm; A time when certain parts of plants or animals would be in “sympathetic” correspondence with certain parts of the human body; An era when praying several times while remaining nails, then buried these cuts in a elder tree, could plaus the teeth alarm. And now it is easier than ever to have an idea of what it should have been, thanks to curious quotes' Transcribed, transcribed and viewable archives of all these manuscripts. Aside from the most bizarre remedies, what is remarkable is how these books also recognize the importance of what we would now call a good night's sleep, regular exercise and a balanced and varied diet. Medieval may have understood their own health better than we imagine, but whatever, we probably do not put the Leechcraft of any time.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.