Hundreds of Medieval Medical Manuscripts with Strange Cures Get Digitized & Put Online: From Leeches to Crushed Weasel Testicles

If any dis­cus­sion of medieval med­i­cine gets going, it’s only a mat­ter of time before some­one brings up leech­es. And it turns out that the cen­tral­i­ty of those squirm­ing blood-suck­ers to the treat­ment of dis­ease in the Mid­dle Ages isn’t much over­stat­ed, at least judg­ing by a look through Curi­ous Cures. A Well­come Research Resources Award-fund­ed project of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge Libraries, it has recent­ly fin­ished con­serv­ing, dig­i­tiz­ing, and mak­ing avail­able online 190 man­u­scripts con­tain­ing more than 7,000 pages of medieval med­ical recipes. These books con­tain a wealth of infor­ma­tion even beyond the text on their pages: a mul­ti-spec­tral imag­ing analy­sis of one of them, for exam­ple, revealed that it was once owned by a cer­tain “Thomas Word, leche” — or leech, i.e., a heal­er who made inten­sive use of the tools you might imag­ine.

Not that the prac­tice of medieval med­i­cine came down to apply­ing leech­es and noth­ing more. In the man­u­scripts dig­i­tized by Curi­ous Cures (which include not just strict­ly med­ical texts but also bibles, law texts, and books of hours), one finds a won­der­land of dove feces, fox lungs, salt­ed owl, eel grease, weasel tes­ti­cles, quick­sil­ver (i.e. mer­cury) — a won­der­land for read­ers curi­ous about medieval forms of knowl­edge, if not for the actu­al patients who had to under­go these dubi­ous treat­ments.

But as any schol­ar of the sub­ject would be quick to remind us, med­ical doc­u­ments in the Mid­dle Ages may have wan­ton­ly mixed folk and “offi­cial” knowl­edge, but they were hard­ly repos­i­to­ries of pure super­sti­tion: rather, they rep­re­sent the best efforts of intel­li­gent peo­ple to under­stand their own bod­ies and the world they inhab­it­ed, with­in the dom­i­nant world­view of their time and place.

That was a time in which health was thought to be deter­mined by the “four humors,” black bile, yel­low bile, blood and phlegm; a time when cer­tain parts of plants or ani­mals were believed to be in “sym­pa­thet­ic” cor­re­spon­dence with cer­tain parts of the human body; a time when repeat­ed­ly pray­ing while clip­ping one’s fin­ger­nails, then bury­ing those clip­pings in an elder tree, could plau­si­bly cure a toothache. And now, it’s eas­i­er than ever to get a sense of what it must have been like, thanks to Curi­ous Cures’ tran­scribed, trans­lat­ed, and search­able archive of all these man­u­scripts. The more out­landish reme­dies aside, what’s remark­able is how these books also acknowl­edge the impor­tance of what we would now call a good night’s sleep, reg­u­lar exer­cise, and a bal­anced, var­ied diet. Medievals may have under­stood their own health bet­ter than we imag­ine, but regard­less, we’re prob­a­bly not bring­ing back leechcraft any­time soon.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Urine Wheels in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Dis­cov­er the Curi­ous Diag­nos­tic Tool Used by Medieval Doc­tors

Behold the Medieval Wound Man: The Poor Soul Who Illus­trat­ed the Injuries a Per­son Might Receive Through War, Acci­dent or Dis­ease

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.