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

  • Wilfrid Bonser
Date:
1963
Catalogue details

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.

    447/492 (page 407)
    wine’); 1 hartclover, drunk in wine; 1 2 marsh mallow, pounded with lard; 3 pellitory ( dohlrune) (‘seethe in water, bathe feet and knees: pound with lard, put in a cloth, and lay to feet and knees’). 4 This last prescription is ‘against fot-adl and against cancor' in the Anglo- Saxon, though the Latin version had ‘gonagram’ (gout in the knee) and not ‘cancor’. The word lip-adl , from lip, a joint, also signifies gout. It occurs but once and the remedy prescribed is that the patient should frequently bathe in a bath in which a fox has been boiled till only the bones are left: the treatment to be repeated annually, with the addition of oil in the bath. 5 (c) ‘Rheum' {dropa) Grattan and Singer translate the word dropa, where it occurs in Lacnunga 9 (xxiii) among ‘miscellaneous remedies’, as ‘rheum’. They give the following note: The A.S. dropa doubtless renders Latin gutta, a condition in which humours were supposed to collect in the diseased part. The word rheum will yield a corresponding meaning if taken in its medieval sense. Gutta appears in modern English as gout, and a gout-like state is indi cated in ... [mdfot-ddle & wiSpone dropan, Cockayne, i, p. 376]. Gutta maligna [appearing in the charm for pains in the teeth, Lacn. 100 (clxvi)] was a common term for a painful spot as in a joint. The word gutta in medieval Latin (French, lagoutte ) is interest ing. Its basic meaning, as in the case of the Anglo-Saxon word Sedre, seems to be a channel ( canalis, rivus) : 6 but Du Cange gives various specialized meanings also, equating it with catarrhus, with fluxio, with fistula, and with podagra 7 [‘arthritis quaelibet’]. Gutta data (goutte sdatique) localizes it as ischiadicus dolor, pain in the hip. Gutta cadiva is translated epilepsy. 8 Cockayne translates dropa as ‘paralysis of a limb’, and adds, ‘the original sense remains in the “dropped hands”, “wrist-drop” of painters, paralysis of the extensor muscles of the wrist’. Bosworth 1 (izth cent.) Fly-leaf leechdoms, Cockayne, vol. i, p. 377. 2 A.S. Herbal, xxv. 4. 3 Ibid, xxxix. z. 4 Ibid, lxxxiii. z. 5 Sextus Placitus, Med. de quadrupedibus, iii. 11. 6 See p. 10. 8 Du Cange, Glossarium, vol. iv, 1885, pp. 14Z-3. 7 See p. 406.