#medieval-medicine

#medieval-medicine

Medieval medical writers didn't shy away from sexual topics-they offered practical advice, foods to try, and prescriptions meant to boost desire and potency. In one of the Middle Ages' most widely used medical textbooks, the physician Ahmed Ibn al-Jazzar lays out why men might struggle with sexual performance and what could be done about it, from everyday ingredients like chickpeas and turnips to carefully measured electuaries and beverages.

Fresh air, balanced food, regular exercise, emotional moderation-this might sound like modern wellness advice, but medieval physicians were already promoting these ideas centuries ago. One popular medieval text even reduced healthy living to just six simple rules. The Theatre of Health ( Theatra Sanitatis) was a widely read work in medieval Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Better known as Tacuinum Sanitatis, the original version of this work was by Ibn Butlan, a physician who worked in Baghdad during the eleventh century.

Frogs appear frequently in medieval medical writings as useful ingredients. Dinkova-Bruun traces their presence in De medicamentis liber, a fifth-century collection of remedies by the Gallo-Roman physician Marcellus Empiricus. His manual catalogues hundreds of treatments from head to toe, combining herbs, animal parts, and ritual actions in equal measure. Among the many creatures pressed into service, the frog features in eleven recipes, often for ailments that were both common and mysterious: earache, ulcers, dysentery, and toothache.

A Wellcome Research Resources Award-funded project of the University of Cambridge Libraries has recently finished conserving, digitizing, and making available online 190 manuscripts containing more than 7,000 pages of medieval medical recipes.

So, would you dare to try out any of these weird medieval cures?