A brand new exhibition affords a glimpse into the bizarre and typically weird medical practices of the Middle Ages.
The Cambridge College Library exhibition, Curious Cures: Medication In The Medieval World, showcases medieval manuscripts detailing remedies starting from the commonplace to the actually peculiar, together with a purported infertility treatment derived from weasels’ testicles.
Dr James Freeman, the exhibition’s curator, explains that the manuscripts “take you to the medieval bedside and reveal the unusual and shocking issues that physicians and healers tried to make their sufferers effectively once more”.
To assist trendy understanding, lots of the historic recipes have been translated for the exhibition.
One such instance, translated from Latin, comes from a Fifteenth-century manuscript compiled by a Carmelite friar. It particulars a steered infertility therapy to assist ladies conceive.
It says: “Take three or 4 weasel testicles and half a handful of younger mouse-ear [a plant also known as chickweed] and burn all of it equally in an earthenware pot.
“Afterwards, grind and mix with the juice of the aforementioned herb, and thus make mushy tablets within the method of a hazelnut kernel, and place them so deeply within the non-public components that they contact the uterus, and go away there for 3 days, throughout which she ought to abstain solely from intercourse.
“After these three days nonetheless, she ought to have intercourse with a person and she or he ought to conceive directly.”
Dr Freeman mentioned medieval drugs “wasn’t merely superstition or blind trial-and-error”.
He mentioned: “It was guided by elaborate and complicated concepts in regards to the physique and the affect upon it of the broader world and even the cosmos.
“The wide range of manuscripts in Curious Cures additionally reveals us that drugs wasn’t practised simply by university-educated physicians, however by monks and friars, by surgeons and their apprentices, by apothecaries and herbalists, by midwives, and by men and women in their very own properties.”
Manuscripts drawn from the collections of the college library and Cambridge’s historic schools will go on show.
There can even be rotating astronomical devices, surgical diagrams and a few of the earliest anatomical photographs in western Europe.
A very placing manuscript incorporates illustrations of “Vein Man” and “Zodiac Man”, illuminating how drugs and astrology had been entwined in medieval instances.
One of the crucial lovely manuscripts on show belonged to Elizabeth of York, Queen of England, spouse of Henry VII and mom of Henry VIII.
This richly illuminated guide incorporates a replica of the Regime Du Corps, a information to wholesome dwelling initially composed 2 hundred years earlier for a French noblewoman by her private doctor.
It was written in French, the language of royalty and aristocracy and unfold shortly throughout western Europe.
“Such an in depth well being regime was out of attain for all however essentially the most rich,” mentioned Dr Freeman.
“Nevertheless, the medical recipes that had been added later behind the guide use the identical spices and customary herbs which can be discovered time and time once more in additional frequent recipe books.
“There’s even a recipe for a laxative powder, which makes you surprise about Elizabeth and Henry’s eating regimen!”
The free exhibition will open to the general public on March 29 and can run till December 6, with pre-booking important.
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