Read Online You Could Look It Up by Jack Lynch - Free Book Online Page A

to work as a scribe, making a clean copy. Or perhaps it was all a fiction. The book mentions two other doctors, Dun and Oxa, who offered advice, but we have no record of them, either. Still, the author, whatever his name, was active in the ninth or tenth century, and the only early surviving copy of his work, the Læceboc — Leechbook , or Book of Healing —is from around the year 950. The name invokes barbarism, though it helps to know that the Old English word læce , pronounced something like “ latch -uh,” meant “physician” before it meant “bloodsucking worm.” In fact, nowhere in Old English medical literature are the annelids mentioned explicitly. 1 The book is a systematic handbook on Old English medical recipes and cures—all part of the field known as læcedom ‘leechdom’ or læcecræft ‘leechcraft’.
    The ninth century is right in the middle of what have been called the Dark Ages, though things were not quite so dark as they are sometimes made out to be. King Alfred, who died in 899, had worked to build an intellectual culture in England, and Bald may have been part of that movement—though medical historian Malcolm Cameron warns that “we have not enough information to do other than guess.” The Leechbook is the oldest medical book we have from England, but most historians believe early medieval English medicine was insular. English authorities quoted only other English authorities, and very little knowledge was coming into England from the Continent. There was also no indication that Anglo-Saxon physicians were familiar with Galen or any of the other major medical writers of ancient Greece or Rome. The Leechbook helped to change that. The book had an English audience in mind: it is written in Old English, not in Latin, so the author had no ambition to be read abroad. But while plenty of homespun English remedies appear in it, interspersed among them are treatments proposed by Greek, Roman, and other sources. Some of Bald’s prescriptions are translated directly from Latin works. As Cameron points out, “From the contents of his book it appears that Bald had available to him in one form or another much of the best of Byzantine and Roman medicine from the third to the ninth centuries, either in Latin or in English translation.” The book “shows a conscious effort to transfer to Anglo-Saxon practice what one physician considered most useful in native and Mediterranean medicine.” 2
    TITLE: Læceboc , or Medicinale anglicum
    COMPILER: Bald ( fl. ninth c.)
    ORGANIZATION: Book 1 on external diseases, book 2 on internal diseases, each arranged from head to foot
    PUBLISHED: c. 950
    PAGES: 256
    ENTRIES: 155 chapters
    TOTAL WORDS: 32,000
    SIZE: 10½″ × 7″ (27 × 19 cm)
    AREA: 131 ft 2 (12 m 2 )
    The book’s two main divisions treat of external and internal maladies, and it may be the only medieval text to start with this fundamental distinction. 3 Within each section, the organization is a capite ad calcem —from the patient’s head down to his shoes. There are sixty-six chapters, containing remedies that cover a wide range of conditions from hiccups to “rotten lung.” One proposed cure for a headache is to take a stalk of crosswort (a flowering plant in the family Rubiaceae ) and bind it to the head with a long piece of warm red flannel. Bald men were encouraged to follow a prescription from Pliny: prepare an ointment out of linseed oil and the ashes of burned bees and apply the result to the scalp overnight. Someone suffering from pain in the lower back was advised to set goat hair on fire and allow the smoke to waft to the afflicted part. There were treatments for both overactive and sluggish libidos (agrimony boiled in ale for the former, agrimony boiled in milk for the latter), inflamed spleen (peas and bread in hot water), and bellyache (take apples, pears, peas, and the flesh of small birds and boil them in water, vinegar, and wine). For a painful spleen, shellfish, half-grown