• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Roasted Puppy Fat And Salty Owls: Bizarre Medieval Medicine Revealed In New Digital Project

August 19, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

As a general rule, if you’re going to get sick, you should try not to do it in the past. The present? Sure. The future? Go for it. But the past? Extremely bad idea. At best, you’re going to be sat in the moonlight and just told you feel better – and at worst, you’re going to have a guy carving up your innards with a chainsaw.

Advertisement

Somewhere in the middle, there’s medieval medicine. A huge new project at Cambridge University Library in the UK is set to bring together unique and irreplaceable handwritten books from hundreds of years ago, revealing thousands of medical – or maybe we should say, “medical” – recipes and texts from medieval physicians.

Diagram of the human body, showing the veins to be opened for blood-letting, 16th century

Diagram of the human body, showing the veins to be opened for blood-letting, 16th century. Image: Cambridge University Library, 2022

“These manuscripts provide brilliant insights into medieval medical culture, and the recipes they contain bring us close to the interactions between patient and practitioner that took place many centuries ago,” said James Freeman, Medieval Manuscripts Specialist at Cambridge University Library, in a statement.

“These recipes are a reminder of the pain and precarity of medieval life: before antibiotics, before antiseptics and before analgesics as we would know them all today.”

That’s putting it mildly. One therapy for gout – a painful type of inflammatory arthritis whose modern treatment consists of ibuprofen and dietary changes – involves grinding a baked, salted owl into a powder and mixing it with boar fat to make a salve that you then rub on the affected area. If that’s not cruel and bizarre enough for you, maybe you could try an alternative: roasting a snail-stuffed puppy over a fire and using the fat from Fido for a salve instead.

Advertisement

In fact, the list of ingredients needed by a medieval “leechcraft” practitioner – always a good sign when your word for medicine involves the name of a bloodsucking worm – is “bewildering” in its scope. Some, like those detailed above, are grisly and hyper-specific; others are things you could find at any supermarket today, such as rosemary, pepper, and milk.

An image of an introduction, written in rhyming couplets, to a compilation of medical recipes in Middle English and Latin

‘The man that will of leechcraft lere, Read on this book and he may hear, Many a medicine both good and true, To heal sores both old and new, Herein are medicines without fable, To heal all sores that are curable, Of sword, knife and of arrow, Be the wound wide or narrow, Of spear, of quarrel, of dagger, of dart, To make him whole in each part.’ More medical textbooks should be in rhyming couplets! Image Credit: Cambridge University Library, 2022

Behind the weird concoctions and medical misunderstandings is something eminently timeless: tales of the human condition. 

“Behind each recipe, however distantly, there lies a human story: experiences of illness and of pain, but also the desire to live and to be healthy,” said Freeman. “Some of the most moving are those that remedies that speak of the hopes or tragic disappointments of medieval people: a recipe ‘for to make a man and woman to get children’, to know whether a pregnant woman carries a boy or a girl, and ‘to deliver a woman of a dead child’.”

Advertisement

The project will take these ancient remedies and bring them into the modern world – the digital world. Not only will over 180 manuscripts be digitized and made freely available online on the Cambridge Digital Library, but they will also have translations and context added for the lay reader, and have keyword searching enabled for scholars of medieval practices.

“Each manuscript will be accompanied by an accessible introduction aimed at a general audience: these will explain what a book contains, place it in a broader context, describe who owned it or pick out something significant about its history,” said Freeman. “The aim is to help both researchers and the public understand, study and value these unique and irreplaceable artefacts.”

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Migrants denounce Mexico’s crackdown amid bilateral talks in Washington
  2. U.S. Senate panel sets hearing on Russian gas pipeline amid Ukraine concerns
  3. Oil prices rise, hit 2-month highs on supply worries
  4. After Pandora Papers, EU says it plans new rules against tax avoidance

Source Link: Roasted Puppy Fat And Salty Owls: Bizarre Medieval Medicine Revealed In New Digital Project

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Can You Be Allergic To Other People? Yes, And It Sounds Like The Worst Thing Ever
  • Animals With “Urban Superpowers” Lurk In London’s Underground, And Some Of Them Want To Drink Your Blood
  • This Is The Largest Radio Color Image Of The Milky Way Ever Assembled – And It’s Gorgeous
  • Why We Can’t Stop Watching True Crime: The Psychological Pull And The Ethical Push
  • “Silent, Ongoing Genocide”: World’s 196 Uncontacted Tribes Are Facing Grave Threats To Their Survival
  • Golden Tigers Are Among The Rarest Big Cats In The World, But They Spell Bad News For Tigers
  • Rare 2-Million-Year-Old Infant Facial Fossils Expand What We Know About Prehistoric Human Children
  • First-Ever 3D Map Of Planet Outside Solar System Reveals Distant World’s Hot Spot And Cool Ring
  • From Chains To Forests: Working Elephants Set To Be Rehabilitated In The Wild Under New Project
  • Why Does Death Have Such A Distinctive Smell?
  • Blue Dogs Have Been Spotted In Chernobyl: What Is Going On?
  • Record-Breaking Gravitational Wave Detection Suggests These Black Holes Merged Before
  • Hurricane Melissa Is 2025’s Strongest Storm Yet, With Turbulence So Bad It Saw Off The Hurricane Hunters
  • Fancy Seeing Your Organs In 4D? Pretty Soon, You Might Be Able To
  • First Known Bats To Glow In The Dark In The US Discovered – But Scientists Aren’t Sure Why
  • “You Be Good. I Love You”: How Alex The Parrot Rewrote Our Understanding Of Animal Intelligence
  • What Would You Find If You Drill Down Deep Under Antarctica?
  • This Is The Safest Place To Sit In Your Car
  • Birds, Hats, And Boycotts: The Story Behind Why It’s A Crime To Collect Feathers
  • Ultra-High-Definition TV – Is It Really Worth It? New Study Figures Out If We Can Even See In UHD
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version