Historian Elma Brenner On Medieval Medicine

Historian Elma Brenner On Medieval Medicine | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘We can say that a lot of the remedies did work. Certainly not all of them. And certainly, it's really interesting to think about remedies that have incredibly convoluted or exotic ingredients. So Theriac is a good example of that, which was a very, kind of a cure all medicine of the later Middle Ages that anyone who could wanted to get hold of, particularly against plague. And it's not clear that that would have worked, but it would have, we can also think about the kind of placebo effect as well, which obviously is impossible to measure.

But it's something we can also think about today as with some of the remedies that we take on a day to day basis like paracetamol. You know that you take it, you're reassured that you've done something and you start to feel better… [Theriac] was a whole mixture of ingredients, some of which came from the east. So from outside Europe, and it included things like snakes venom and to counteract poison, so sort of like for like, counteraction…

[On harmful medicines] Some remedies, for example, involve lead, which we know is not a good thing. For the treatment of the pox, which is roughly equivalent to modern day syphilis in the early decades of the 16th century, mercury was an ingredient which we again know is not a good thing. Overall, however, the overriding impression you get if you're leafing through the pages of a late medieval recipe mompendium with lots of medical recipes, is that these are plant based remedies, with a number of plants that we might use today in cooking, that we also know are actually ingredients for modern day pharmaceuticals, that we don't think would have harmed the body.

So the overriding impression is that these wouldn't have harmed people. You do get interesting occasional lawsuits actually from the later Middle Ages against apothecaries, or physicians, sort of claiming that the remedy was harmful. So there is some evidence for that kind of thing, but not much.’

‘And generally speaking, do you think did medieval people believe in… the treatments that they took or or were advised to take? Did they believe that they had efficacy?’

‘That's a really interesting question. So, on the one hand, yes, because we see these remedies being copied numerous times. And in the early decades of printing from the end of the 15th century, we get printed compendia that were clearly selling very well. And there were lots of different versions of them and they were kind of popular, kind of self help books.

On the other hand, within those collections, you get multiple different remedies for the same ailment. So you might have something like excessive bleeding… you might have seven different remedies to try to counteract that, which suggests an awareness that it might not work. Which is an important difference, I think, from modern day medicine, when we tend to have complete faith in pharmaceuticals. And we go and buy something over the counter, and we're confident that that will work. We're not shopping around for a different version of aspirin, for instance.

A different attitude in the Middle Ages where you might try several different things, you're quite open minded, you're ready to see failure’...

[On bloodletting] ‘If you were someone who had the means to kind of follow a regimen to stay healthy, you would regularly have yourself bled in order to just keep the humours balanced. And we know that this certainly happened in monasteries as part of the monastic life…

‘What do they do with the blood that they let?’...

‘Usually it was disposed of. So some medical ingredients of the magical kind actually might include a quantity of human blood. Possibly an interesting variant of this is the blood taken from the little finger of a child sometimes comes up, something that you would put into your magical remedy. Apart from that, I think it is disposed of. However, other human fluids, particularly urine, did have a range of functions. So urine did have a range of industrial functions, including in the production of parchments, which is quite interesting’"