The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser].

  • Wilfrid Bonser
Date:
1963
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sundcorn) is to be pounded in wine: ‘it breaks the stones the same day and tugs the mout’. 1 The other recipe concerns lithospermon (‘stone seed’): ‘In the height of it, it has stones white and round as pearls and of the size of peas, and of the hardness of stone, and they cleave together and are hollow within and the seed is within.’ In case stones wax in the bladder and a man may not pass water, the recipe says that these stones should be taken to the weight of 5 pennies and given to drink in wine: ‘it breaks the stones and leads forth the water’. 2 This prescription is derived directly from Pliny. 3 The Anglo-Saxon Herbal prescribes ivy as a diuretic: seven or eleven berries are to be pounded in water and given to drink. ‘Wonderfully it gathers the stones in the bladder, and breaks them and draws them forth through the urine.’ 4 For retention of urine or incontinence, various remedies, mostly of an animal nature—such as the eating of a fried goat’s bladder— are given in chapter xxxvii of the First Leechbook. (k) Joints (A.S. lith, a joint: lip-seaw and lipule, synovial fluid) ‘If the synovia [ lipule\ runs out, take the netherward part of marche [apium graveolens] and honey and wheaten meal and wieggan innel [Cockayne suggests Innelge and translates ‘the bowels of an earwig’]: rub them together and lay on.’ 5 Lithwort, dwarf elder, is also prescribed. Presumably it obtained its name owing to its being used for this purpose. (/) Hair The Anglo-Saxons had prescriptions intended to make the hair grow and also to remove it. For the former, a prescription runs: ‘If hair fall off, boil poly pody \eofor-fearn\ and wash the head with that, so warm.’ 6 There are, however, more prescriptions to secure the opposite result, though perhaps the possibilities of thus obtaining it would 1 A.S. Herbal, xeix. 2. Cf. also Leechbook III, xx, where sundcorns again are to be used, and Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxii. 30. 2 A.S. Herbal, clxxx. 1-2. 3 Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxvii. 74. Quoted on p. 250. 4 A.S. Herbal, c. 1. See also the recipe at the end of the last section. 5 Leechbook I, lxi. 2. 6 Ibid, lxxxvii. 1. D d B 3990