In The Footsteps Of The Healers

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

M Y    T I M E    H A S    C O M E

You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.

STORY TIME

Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.

Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.

But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.

BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.

Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:

Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.

For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus. 

With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:

Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.

Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.

Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.

A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I don’t know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts. 

Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.

What an interesting find.

Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:

This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.

It worked well.

It worked extremely well. 

So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as it’s more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witches’ brew freakin murdered it.

Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.

Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this. 

To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic. 

Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.

All that to say:  Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Further reading:

The 2015 Ancientbiotics report: A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity

NPR: ‘Ancientbiotics’ Researchers Look For Old Fixes To Modern Ailments

Mental Floss: 20 Anglo-Saxon Remedies from Bald’s Leechbook

Read a paper about how scholars are building on the work of the Ancientbiotics project to better understand how to apply ancient ideas effectively to modern medicine.

Look through Royal 12 D XVIII for yourself! Bald’s eyesalve recipe is on f. 12v and looks like this:

Image 1: Honey bees in northern Turkey (source) Image 2: Bee hives in northern Turkey (source) Image 3: “Deli bal” - the Turkish variety of “mad honey” (source) Image 4: Town in northern Turkey where honey is an important industry (source)

Deli bal - Hallucinogenic Turkish honey

An excerpt from Emma Bryce’s Modern Farmer piece on mad honey:

The dark, reddish, “mad honey,” known as deli bal in Turkey, contains an ingredient from rhododendron nectar called grayanotoxin — a natural neurotoxin that, even in small quantities, brings on light-headedness and sometimes, hallucinations. In the 1700s, the Black Sea region traded this potent produce with Europe, where the honey was infused with drinks to give boozers a greater high than alcohol could deliver. When over-imbibed, however, the honey can cause low blood pressure and irregularities in the heartbeat that bring on nausea, numbness, blurred vision, fainting, potent hallucinations, seizures, and even death, in rare cases. (…) “There are more than 700 different species [of rhododendron] in the world, but according to our knowledge just two or three include grayanotoxin in their nectars,” says SÁ¼leyman Turedi, a doctor at the Karadeniz Technical University School of Medicine in Trabzon, Turkey, who studies deli bal‘s effects and has witnessed more than 200 cases of mad honey poisoning. (…) Although the product makes up only a tiny percentage of the Black Sea’s honey production, it’s long held a strong Turkish following. “People believe that this honey is a kind of medicine,” Turedi says. “They use it to treat hypertension, diabetes mellitus and some different stomach diseases. And also, some people use deli bal to improve their sexual performance.” (…) The honey is taken in small amounts, sometimes boiled in milk, and consumed typically just before breakfast, he adds — not slathered on toast or stirred generously into tea the way normal honey would be. Its value to customers has given beekeepers an incentive to keep visiting those rhododendron fields and producing it alongside their normal honey products. (…) Indeed, in 67 B.C. Roman soldiers invaded the Black Sea region under General Pompey’s command, and those loyal to the reigning King Mithridates secretly lined the Romans’ path with enticing chunks of mad honeycomb. The unwitting army ate these with gusto, as the story goes. Driven into an intoxicated stupor by the hallucinogenic honey, many of the flailing soldiers became easy prey, and were slain.

– From Emma Bryce. “The Strange History of ‘Mad Honey.’“ In Modern Farmer, 4 September 2014.

Here’s a view of the rhododendron species that provides the local Turkish honey bees with the chemical source for mad honey:

The species is Rhododendron ponticum (image source). The flower is the source of the grayanotoxin that gives mad honey its intoxicating effects.

Mad honey from the Gurung people of the Himalaya

There’s also another famous “mad honey” from near the Annapurna Massif in central Nepal.

This mad honey, like its Turkish counterpart, is also made by bees using rhododendron, and also gains its hallucinogenic and intoxication properties from grayanotoxin.

In these steep valleys near the southern edge of the Himalaya beneath the peak of Annapurna, giant honey bees often keep their honey elevated at dramatic heights on cliff faces.

Take a look at some nice shots from a 2016 Vice documentary. (Image credit might best be attributed to the documentary’s cinematographer Igor Kropotov)

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This Nepalese honey is harvested by Gurung people living in the nearby valleys.

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For context.

Here’s where Turkish deli bal honey is produced.

The reason that honey bees can use the proper rhododendron species is because both the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea create narrow strips of land with fertile, marine-climate temperate forest. These regions are known as “the Black Sea littoral” forest and the “Caspian littoral” forest. These fertile regions stand in stark contrast to the semi-arid steppe and arid deserts that surround the region.

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The Nepalese mad honey is produced at the abrupt Himalayan slope near Annapurna in central Nepal.

Emma Dupree, 1898-1996. Photos by Mary Anne McDonald.

Just last week, Lakshmikutty Amma received India’s 4th-highest civilian honor, the Padma Shri Award. 

Celtic Goddesses Collection

Fruit & Herb Infused Water

Make a pitcher - perfect for springtime!

Lavender Citrus Water - Best if consumed first thing in the morning

alleviates anxiety, digestive aid, liver detoxifier, antibacterial, alkalizer

3 large lemons, cut into thick slices

¼ cup lavender

½ gallon of water

Minty Pineapple Water

good for digestion, high in Vitamin A&C, combats allergies, energy, prevent nausea, metabolism

8-10 mint leaves

¼ portion of a pineapple, peeled and cut into small triangles

8 cups water

Blackberry Sage Water

high in antioxidants, bone health, helps relieve PMS, skin rejuvenator, anti-inflammatory, anti-viral

10 cups of water

1 cup of blackberries that have been very slightly crushed

3-4 sage leaves

Watermelon Rosemary Water

heart healthy, potassium, diuretic, improved memory, mood elevator, fresh breath, anti-aging

10 cups of water

1 cup of watermelon cut into cubes

2 rosemary stems

Refrigerate over night if possible, otherwise, at least 3 hours.

Churchyard, by Līga Kļaviņa

in the most general aesthetic terms possible

1600s: most witch-hunts ended in this century. no witches were burned in North America; they were hanged or in one case pressed to death

1700s: the American Revolution. Marie Antoinette. the French Revolution. the crazy King George. most pirate movies

1800-1830: Jane Austen! Pride and Prejudice! those dresses where the waist is right under one’s boobs and men have a crapton of facial hair inside high collars

1830-1900: Victorian. Les Miserables is at the beginning, the Civil War is in the middle, and Dracula is at the end

1900-1920: Edwardian. Titanic, World War I, the Samantha books from American Girl, Art Nouveau

1920s: Great Gatsby. Jazz Age. Flappers and all that. most people get this right but IT IS NOT VICTORIAN. STUFF FROM THIS ERA IS NOT VICTORIAN. DO NOT CALL IT VICTORIAN OR LIST IT ON EBAY AS VICTORIAN. THAT HAPPENS SURPRISINGLY OFTEN GIVEN HOW STAGGERING THE VISUAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ERAS IS. also not 100 years ago yet, glamour.com “100 years of X” videos. you’re lazy, glamour.com. you’re lazy and I demand my late Edwardian styles

I’m pagan. I practice magic. I believe I have encountered ghosts. you don’t have to believe the same things I do, but like hell will you denigrate anyone’s beliefs- the harmless beliefs, that is; the witch hunts are still appalling -on my post

of course I believe in science. there’s empirical evidence, so I’d be a fool not to. but science doesn’t disprove my spiritual beliefs. sure, some of them don’t fit with what we’ve learned so far, but we’re still learning. those Americans who believed in vampires in the late 1800s were trying to find an explanation for outbreaks of tuberculosis and, actually, the medical establishment at the time had only a slightly better grasp on its actual causes. the miasma theory of disease was still popular, though it was rapidly losing ground to germ theory. substitute night air for vampires and you get the a good chunk of “the knowledge of their time,” and yet that sounded less ridiculous to them because it seemed to have scientific support

So why am I being so harsh? Because, benign magical thinking opens the door to harmful magical thinking. Once someone believes there is a god protecting them from evil, it is a rational though process to conclude that there could be agents of evil working on earth who they must vanquish. Once someone believes that there are magical solutions to problems, they may put themselves at risk by turning away from effective material solutions. There are loads of scammers in this world who don’t believe any of the magical bullshit they say but they’ll gladly use it to swindle the people who do believe it. 

Look, just because I do a spell for dream clarity doesn’t mean I won’t vaccinate my kids someday. I know the difference between problems magic can solve and problems science can solve. Some people don’t, but as I said, they’d be susceptible to junk science even if they didn’t believe in magic.