Medieval History
Did monks in the Middle Ages know more about medicine than we thought? A German medical historian is combing medieval manuscripts looking for recipes that could be helpful today. Pharmaceutical companies have taken a keen interest in his research.
"This medication is delicious," says Johannes Mayer, 56, looking ecstatic. "And it actually helps against digestive disorders and colds."
Its composition is as surprising as its effect: Caraway soaked in vinegar, dates pickled in red wine, dried ginger and green pepper. All of this is crushed with a mortar and pestle and combined with baking soda and honey to make a sticky paste. The name of the remedy is also odd: Diaspolis. "We have no idea what this is supposed to mean," says Mayer, a medical historian. "The scribe apparently made a mess of things."
Mayer, a renowned expert on medieval monastic medicine, is sitting in a neon-lit room full of overflowing bookshelves in the Würzburg Institute of the History of Medicine. Detailed copies of handwritten documents from the Middle Ages are on the desk in front of him. His favorite recipe, with its strange name, is from the "Lorsch pharmacopoeia," the oldest existing book of monastic medicine, written around 795 A.D., in the Lorsch Imperial Abbey near the southwestern German city of Worms....
Click here to read this article from Der Spiegel
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Medieval History
Ground Mouse and Cheese Mold: Looking for Medical Miracles in Medieval Manuscripts
Did monks in the Middle Ages know more about medicine than we thought? A German medical historian is combing medieval manuscripts looking for recipes that could be helpful today. Pharmaceutical companies have taken a keen interest in his research.
"This medication is delicious," says Johannes Mayer, 56, looking ecstatic. "And it actually helps against digestive disorders and colds."
Its composition is as surprising as its effect: Caraway soaked in vinegar, dates pickled in red wine, dried ginger and green pepper. All of this is crushed with a mortar and pestle and combined with baking soda and honey to make a sticky paste. The name of the remedy is also odd: Diaspolis. "We have no idea what this is supposed to mean," says Mayer, a medical historian. "The scribe apparently made a mess of things."
Mayer, a renowned expert on medieval monastic medicine, is sitting in a neon-lit room full of overflowing bookshelves in the Würzburg Institute of the History of Medicine. Detailed copies of handwritten documents from the Middle Ages are on the desk in front of him. His favorite recipe, with its strange name, is from the "Lorsch pharmacopoeia," the oldest existing book of monastic medicine, written around 795 A.D., in the Lorsch Imperial Abbey near the southwestern German city of Worms....
Click here to read this article from Der Spiegel
- What's So Interesting About Anglo-saxon Medicine?
Conan Doyle writes: Given that this is the topic to which I have dedicated the last five years of my life, I may be giving something of a biased view, but to be honest I cannot think of a more fascinating facet of Anglo-Saxon society. The most sophisticated...
- Medieval Monastic Library Of Lorsch Recreated Online
The unique holdings of the medieval monastic library of Lorsch, currently scattered over 68 libraries worldwide, are being re-compiled into a virtual library. Heidelberg University Library and local government officials in Germany have been working since...
- Meeting ?reinvented Our Understanding Of Medical Manuscripts? In The High Middle Ages
An international team of medieval scholars from the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, and Canada have made several important discoveries related to medical texts during a meeting held at the National Humanities Center in North...
- Iranian Scholars Share Avicenna's Medieval Medical Wisdom
For pulmonary ailments, certain medieval physicians had a useful medical textbook on hand offering detailed information remarkably similar to those a modern doctor might use today. One of the fathers of medicine, the great Persian scholar Avicenna left...
- Zrinka Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology
Zrinka Stahuljak just published Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); 368 pp.http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15046.html The publisher's description: In...