Medieval Medical Recipes : Medical treatises and recipes

Medieval Medical Recipes

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.14.51 is a miscellany of practical and instructive works of the kind typically found in circulation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It comprises two codicological units, similar in decoration and style of handwriting, that have been bound together. Such compilations may have been used by healers, leech doctors or, sometimes, by individuals or families in domestic contexts. Though this manuscript shows signs of having been professionally produced, the combination of treatises and the organisational principles, as well as the overwhelming preference for English over Latin (though we find a few lines of French at f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(66);return false;'>25v</a>) suggests that it was used perhaps by a community leech doctor and not a barber-surgeon. As Elaine Miller ((1978), p. xxxiii) has argued, the fifteenth-century practitioner who owned and used the book was 'extremely pragmatic, possibly eclectic, and most probably fairly unsophisticated'. The presence of some ballads (e.g. f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(201);return false;'>95r</a>, copied by a later hand) and texts like <i>The Boke of Marchalsi</i>, a prose work on equine medicine, might indicate a wider context for the volume, one that extends the remit beyond the realm of health and healing. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Health and healing, however, are common preoccupations in manuscripts of this kind. Just like today, people struggled with all sorts of ailments and healthcare issues. In Trinity MS R.14.51, we witness a clear interest in the preservation and clear presentation of charms and cures for a range of ailments, among them toothache, the 'falling evil' (what we might call epilepsy today), to help women in childbirth, eye complaints, and to staunch the flow of blood. Many of the cures are short and not too complex, suggesting that the leech doctor may have not been overly-proficient. At f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(71);return false;'>28r</a>, for example, we find an economical instruction to mend 'broken bones in mannys heede' that advises the reader to treat it topically with ground agrimony, or else to drink an infusion of betony to help set the bones and heal the wound. Agrimony as an ingredient in a cure for the same complaint recurs at f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(80);return false;'>32v</a>, where it is mixed with honey and used to bathe the wound. The instructions at f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(71);return false;'>28r</a> are immediately followed by a charm to catch a thief, discussed below. Based on the context and accessibility of the cures, it is likely that these would have been used by self-taught medical man. These receipts are neatly – probably professionally – copied, making good use of visual strategies to break up the text, enabling easier consultation. Throughout there are of decorative initials, blue and red paraphs marking breaks in the text or indicating another version of a charms or recipe, and headings in rubric, features that taken together render the manuscript easily consultable. Additionally, some of the remedies, particularly those found at the beginning of the manuscript (from ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(17);return false;'>1r–5r</a>) are in verse, arguably in order to help readers or users commit some of them to memory. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Many of the medical receipts are generically close to charms and prayers, again a typical situation in the later medieval period. For instance, the instructions in this manuscript to help a woman through a difficult childbirth, known as the <i>Maria peperit Christum</i> charm, are based on a Latin prose prayer about the Blessed Virgin Mary's delivery of Jesus. The charm is to be written on parchment and bound about the stomach of the labouring woman. It is found here at f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(47);return false;'>16r</a>. Yet other charms in the volume involve writing out certain words or formulae and having a patient - or, in this case, a suspect - ingest the ground up parchment. Here, at f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(71);return false;'>28r</a>, we find a charm to catch a thief that asks the reader to '[T]ake and write þese lettres folowynge and ʒeve hit to eete to þo þat þou haste suspicion to and ʒif he be culpable hit schall not passe hys throte.' The required letters are copied out in red to distinguish them from the other instructions. Interestingly, in this manuscript the instructions to write out remedies or methods to discover something are grouped together, suggesting a high level of organisation across the second part of the volume. Alongside the charm to catch a thief we also find written charm, here called a 'fayre medecyne' for 'the foule evil' that asks the reader to write a series of names, including those of the three wise men, on parchment, and to hang it around the neck of the afflicted person. The manuscript also contains two short tracts on medical diagnosis by urine colour (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(51);return false;'>18r-18v</a> and <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(79);return false;'>32r-32v</a>). </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Many of the cures in the manuscript rely on the use of herbs, and therefore it is not surprising to discover, beginning at f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(84);return false;'>34v</a>, a lengthy verse herbal, the <i>Tretys of Diverse Herbis</i>. Written in rhyming couplets, the text is based on the Latin <i>Macer Floridius</i>, and is extant in some sixteen other manuscripts. It opens with an explication of the properties and uses of betony, the very herb that is called for the medicine to heal head wounds, mentioned above: 'To telle of betoygne I haue gret mynde / And of other erbes as I fynde.' The herbal is the central treatise in the manuscript, offering cures using not just betony but herbs such as motherwort, celandine and burnet, as well as commonly grown garden flowers like roses and lilies. Here again we find a firm association between cures and charms, as well as an interest not just in cures but wellbeing more generally and other life matters. One of the instructions for celandine requires the reader to gather the herb early on Lammas day (August 1st), to hold it high and to say 'pater noster and Auees þree'. For this person, '[N]o prison schall hym holde no dore. / He schall ouercome all hys enemys.'</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Relatedly, there is a strong interest in prognostication and astronomy in the volume, and these aspects may have been useful for our leech doctor as he worked out the optimal times for medical treatment, the reign of the planets, and the phases of the moon, and also (un)lucky days and those best for favourable outcomes. Among these tracts is an abridged version of the well-known and widely-coped <i>Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy</i> (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(166);return false;'>77v-86r</a>), an accessible guide to the planets and their influence and reign, as well as the signs of the zodiac. There is a cluster of similar texts at the beginning of the volume. At f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(47);return false;'>16r</a> is a tract on favourable times of the month in which to administer medicines based on astronomical conditions, a text known as 'A general teachynge to ʒeue medecyns'. And grouped together at ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(52);return false;'>18v–22r</a> are two treatises on the moon, one concerned with bloodletting and the other with destiny, demonstrating further the complementary nature of the material in this volume. The presence of ownership inscriptions (including the names John Fertho, Jacob Hawkins of Worcester, and George Atkinson) as well as the drawing of a horse-mill with the inscription 'Bussell' at the opening of the manuscript (potentially referring to a family of that name near Chester (see Mooney (1995)), indicates that the volume maybe have held value in the context of the gentry or landed family as well as for healers and leech doctors.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Carrie Griffin<br /> Ollamh Comhlach, Béarla / Associate Professor, English<br /> Scoil an Bhéarla, na Gaeilge agus na Cumarsáide / School of English, Irish and Communication, Ollscoil Luimnigh / University of Limerick</p><p style='text-align: justify;'><b>References</b><div style='list-style-type: disc;'><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'><i>The Middle English 'Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy': A Parallel-Text Edition</i>, ed. by Carrie Griffin, Middle English Texts, 47 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013) </div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Carrie Griffin, 'A Previously Unrecorded Copy of a Middle English Medical Text in Wellcome MS 408', <i>Notes and Queries</i>, 71 (2023), 24–25</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Elaine M. Miller, <i>'In Hoote Somere': A Fifteenth-Century Medical Manuscript</i> (unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1978)</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Linne R. Mooney, <i>The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist 11: Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge</i> (Oxford: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 49–53</div></div><br /></p>