Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN)–Chicken soup may be your answer to fighting the common cold. but new project He unearthed 1,000-year-old scrolls offering strange medical treatments recommended by those who lived in the Middle Ages.
The violence of medieval society is reflected in these recipes, from hideous animal-derived remedies, to advice on how to stabilize broken bones, or how to determine if a skull is broken.
The University of Cambridge Library in the UK has launched a two-year project aimed at digitizing, cataloging and preserving more than 180 medieval manuscripts, containing some 8,000 unedited handwritten prescriptions.
Most of the manuscripts date back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the oldest is a thousand years old.
Some of these manuscripts are pocket notebooks designed to be carried and can be made by medical practitioners themselves, according to a press release issued by the University of Cambridge, on Wednesday.
Recipes usually consist of a short series of simple instructions.
In the texts, there are common ingredients we know today, including herbs such as sage, rosemary, thyme, and mint, as well as spices such as cumin, pepper, and ginger.
However, there are also some doubts, especially those derived from animals.
Do you suffer from gout? One method of treatment in the Middle Ages involved stuffing the puppy with snails and sage, then roasting the animal over a fire.
Thus, the resulting fat is used to make an ointment.
A recipe suggested, salt an owl and bake it until it can be ground into a powder, and mixed with lard. Finally, this mixture was used as an ointment to be rubbed on the victim’s body.
What regarding cataracts? One of the recipes suggested mixing rabbit gall with honey and applying it to the eye with a feather.
This was a three-night course of treatment.
“These recipes serve as a reminder of the pain and fragility of medieval life, that is, before antibiotics and before antiseptics and painkillers, which we all know today,” said James Freeman, a specialist in medieval manuscripts at Cambridge University Library who leads the Curious Cures project.
He continued: “Behind every recipe, however remote, is a human story: experiences of disease and pain, but also the desire to live and be healthy. Among the most exciting are those remedies that speak of the hopes or disappointments of people in the Middle Ages: a recipe for making men and women have children. Finding out if the pregnant woman and what gender her fetus is, a boy or a girl.
Malignant sores and cancer are just some of the troublesome ailments revealed in recipe books and affecting people in the Middle Ages.
Freeman said digital images of the manuscripts, detailed descriptions and texts produced by the project’s catalogers will be published and made freely available to anyone in the Cambridge Digital Library.
“The goal is to help researchers and the public understand, study and evaluate these unique and irreplaceable artifacts,” he added.
