Anglo-Saxon medicine

During my MA year at York, I took a History of the Body class with one Mark Jenner, an early modernist boffin with a sharp mind but no group-teaching ability. (An academic, in other words.) He had singularly failed to get discussion going all semester, until on the last day he posited the question, Can we say that mediaeval people really were possessed by demons? In other words, is it possible that demonic possession is in fact a better model than, say, epilepsy, for what these people were experiencing? This proposition, rather predictably, got my goat, and we spent the rest of the seminar arguing about it. I objected on Popperian grounds to this misty-eyed cultural relativism—it all seemed like a rather sappy sophism to me.

Hence, I rather enjoyed this article—Barbara Brennessel, Michael Drout and Robyn Gravel, 'A reassessment of the efficacy of Anglo-Saxon medicine', Anglo-Saxon England 34. They discuss the effectiveness of mediaeval potions against the staphylococcus which causes eye-styes—in this case, cropleac and garleac (taken to be some combination of onion, garlic and leek), oxgall, wine and brass.

M. L. Cameron began publishing a set of articles on Anglo-Saxon medicine, culminating in his 1993 book on the subject, which argued that Anglo-Saxon medical texts, in particular Bald’s Leechbook, were careful compilations of Latin sources incorporating the medical knowledge of Greek, Roman, North African and Byzantine culture. . . he also argued that there was significant rational basis for a variety of Old English remedies: 'Did ancient and medieval physicians use ingredients and methods which were likely to have had beneficial effects on the patients whose ailments they treated? . . . Yes, and their prescriptions were about as good as anything prescribed before the mid-twentieth century.'

However,

We compounded the [Anglo-Saxon] remedies and tested them in vitro against common disease-causing bacteria. Unfortunately for our hypothesis, Cameron’s argument and the Anglo-Saxon patients who were treated with these compounds, the remedies that we tested are not biologically effective against the infectious agents they are intended to combat. In fact, some of the Anglo-Saxon recipes take biologically efficacious ingredients and process them into ineffective mixtures.

Sorry, loves, but those mediaevals really were pretty backward.