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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    412 ORGANIC DISEASES AND THEIR TREATMENT make like a little cake; and apply to the rump as hot as thou canst bear. . . . Wash not with water, but wipe clean with a cloth, and put a very thin cloth between the rump and the cake. 1 The term ‘bleeding fig’, in section xix of the Lacnunga, again obviously indicates a haemorrhoid: the remedy is to swallow nine slices of ‘myrrh the plant’, with honey on top of each, the process to be continued nine mornings and nine nights, unless cure comes sooner. Bosworth and Toller translate the A.S. murra by ‘cicely’, but Grattan and Singer think that murra da wyrt cannot be identified. 2 A salve ‘for wens and for the flowing (? discharging) fic' is to be found in an eleventh-century manuscript fragment which was dis covered in a book-binding in the collection of Viscount Clifden and is now in the Wellcome Library. The remedy consists of the roots of cucumber and other plants boiled in malt for ale ( on mealtealop), wrung through a linen cloth, and boiled in virgin honey (i.e. honey distilled from the comb, without squeezing: hunig-tedr). 3 The First Leechbook has two recipes wiS seondum omum which it equates with fic\ one prescribes a daily application of butcher’s broom with bullock’s gall mixed with honey and soot; the other, an ointment made of various ingredients. 4 That worms were thought to be the cause of haemorrhoids is seen from the following prescription for fic-adl: ‘Work a fomenta tion ( beding ) thus: take the red “ryden”, put it in a trough, heat stones very hot, lay them within the trough, and let [the patient] sit on a stool over the fomentation that it may reek him well, then the fig-worms will fall on the fomentation.’ 5 (h) Insomnia The two plants best known as remedies against wakefulness in Anglo-Saxon times and throughout the Middle Ages were man- dragora and poppy. The instructions for application of the former are to take the juice and smear the forehead, 6 of the latter to rub down in oil and to smear not only the forehead but the whole body also. 7 1 Lacn. 44 (lxxviii). 2 Grattan and Singer, p. 102, note 9. 3 A. Napier, ‘Altenglische Miscellen, Ill.d.’ Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen, 1890, Bd. 84, pp. 325-6. 4 Leechbook I, xxxix. 3. 5 Leechbook III, xlviii. A similar fomentation occurs in Lacn. 48 (lxxxiv). 6 A.S. Herbal, cxxxii. 2. 7 Leechbook I, Ixxxii.