#medieval-medicine

#medieval-medicine

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?