MEDIEVAL MEDICAL RECIPES DISCOVERED FEATURES STRANGEST INGREDIENTS LIKE FOX LUNGS AND DOVE FECES

Our current understanding of medicine is one of the most significant contrasts between medieval and modern existence. Our knowledge of the human body and its health is far more sophisticated now than it has ever been, and we can boast of having several vaccines and having eradicated some of the most deadly diseases in the world. While we might take Advil to relieve a headache or apply Neosporin to a wound, what did our 15th-century forefathers do? Some answers can be found at Curious Cures.

Curious Cures, a painstaking digital library comprising 186 medieval manuscripts that include 8,000 unedited medical recipes, was made possible by a Wellcome Research Resources Award through the University of Cambridge. The majority of these recipes, known as receptaria, date from the 14th or 15th century and were composed in Latin, French, and Middle English between the 11th and 16th centuries. Commonplaces like ale, white wine, vinegar, milk, and honey are encountered throughout, as are unexpected and occasionally strange items like roasted puppy fat, dove dung, fox lungs, salted owl, and eel oil.

In addition to these bizarre ingredients, a lot of recipes also show medieval views on the human body, some of which could seem superstitious to us. For example, one recipe by alchemist, occultist, and astrologer John Dee calls for a medicinal salve to cure wounds that is said to be able to heal patients up to thirty miles away. The recipe gets even stranger when Dee insists that the medicine be given to the "blooded weapon" that initially inflicted the harm, rather than immediately to the wound. As one might anticipate at this stage, the ingredients in the recipe are similarly out of the ordinary: powdered mummy, human fat and blood, and skull moss.

In an essay about Dee's remedy, a Curious Cures researcher states that "the gory recipe was at the center of a heated debate in which the Calvinist physician Rudolph Goclenius defended the salve, explaining that it operated through magnetic powers between the weapon and wound that [traveled] via the stars, whereas the Jesuit priest Jean Roberti attributed its efficacy to demonic powers."

Instructions for creating a mystical amulet that supposedly shields its wearer from demons are written in Latin in some manuscripts, which go even further toward the paranormal. One literature highlights the Cross as a healing symbol, while another talks about a mystical hazel branch that may be used to stop bleeding. The digitised manuscripts' contents include, among other things, theology, mathematics, astronomy, poetry, and Bibles in addition to these medical issues.