Medieval Medical Recipes : Small medical handbook

Medieval Medical Recipes

The first thing a reader notes about Trinity College MS O.1.77 is its small size. This tiny medical handbook measures 105 x 70 mm (4.13 x 2.76 in), which makes it truly portable in a pocket or a pouch, hanging from the belt. Most of the manuscript is written on paper. Here the paper was likely folded into sixteen sections to produce a 'sextodecimo' (also known as '16mo' and 'sixteenmo'). Paper manuscripts are divided into sizes based on how many times the paper had to be folded. Folio was folded a single time, producing a large and expensive book equivalent of a modern 'coffee-table book'. Quarto and octavo were the two most popular sizes, in which the paper was folded to produce four or eight leaves respectively.The contents of the manuscript are typical for the mid- to late fifteenth century. It contains texts for making diagnoses based on the colour of the patient's urine and the humoral disposition of the patient based on the position of the zodiac. There are texts for making purgative and laxative remedies and no fewer than three texts on the plague, all different versions of a treatise by a fourteenth-century physician John of Burgundy, who wrote the most common plague tract in medieval England and Scotland. The fifteenth century is known as a high time for astrological medicine and alcohol-based medicaments – both of which are well represented in Trinity College MS O.1.77.The manuscript has attracted scholarly interest due to its connections to commercial copying of medical manuscripts in London. The early part of collection consists of an anthology of medical texts that is found in nearly identical order in six manuscripts, known as the Voigts-Sloane Sibling Group (named after Linda Voigts, who first identified them in 1990, and the Sloane Collection in the British Library, where many of the manuscripts are located). The texts in common likely constituted a set group that was used as an exemplar in a workshop engaged in commercial book production. Two other Voigts-Sloane Siblings are also pocket-sized - London, British Library, Sloane MS 3566 and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990104679120203941/catalog'>Boston, Countway Library of Medicine, Ballard MS 19</a> - indicating the existence of a market for these texts in a portable format. However, MS O.1.77 differs from its two pocket-sized siblings by containing additional texts. These include a much longer astrological section and two texts for alcohol-based treatments: an extract from De Vinis, a book on medicinal properties of wines by Arnaldus de Villa Nova (d. 1311) and the Book of Quintessence by John of Rupescissa (d. c. 1365/1370), a text which promises to give instructions on distilling the mysterious fifth element, which has truly remarkable healing qualities (however, the resulting substance seems to be a pure form of alcohol). The latter is copied on parchment rather than paper, though the poor quality suggests that it comprises 'off-cuts', small pieces left over from preparing parchment for book, which were often cheaper than paper. Altogether, these texts enhanced the standard anthology by providing what was considered at the time to be cutting-edge medical treatments. That the book was put to practical use is evidenced by the concentration of wear and tear around pages that advised about diagnosis, such as the coloured urine flasks on ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(60);return false;'>24v-29v</a>.Dr Alpo Honkapohja Tallinn University