Read Online You Could Look It Up by Jack Lynch - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jack Lynch
Ads: Link
pigs, the meat of goats, and the juice of peas were prescribed, and for diarrhea, cabbage juice soup or, for more serious cases, old cheese boiled in goat’s milk with goat’s grease. A run-of-the-mill lung problem was said to respond to beets simmered in butter, but a case of the dreaded “rotten lungs” called for something fancier: a drink made from bog myrtle, a flowering shrub known to scientists today as Myrica gale , boiled withmalt in water, replaced after a while by fresh yeast, mixed with wormwood (a plant in the genus Artemisia ), woundwort (a plant in the genus Stachys , also known as betony), and daisies.
Some of the “cures” have less to do with medicine than with magic—the agate, for instance, is a powerful talisman. As medical historian Debby Banham points out, “Early medieval medicine was not that effective in actually curing anyone.” All of this was long before the advent of evidence-based medicine. Still, that does not mean the prescriptions were useless. Many of the “medicines” probably provided at least some liquid to help the dehydrated, and some calories to give strength to those who had been weakened by some ailment. As historian Audrey Meaney argues, the Leechbook “is by far the most comprehensive and best organized of all the Old English medical compilations… . The system used to sort and classify all this material must have been extensive and was usually also very efficient.” 4
These are all things Bald related directly; he also managed to speak indirectly, revealing things about Old English medical practice. As Cameron observes, “we find phrases which give an idea of what was expected of a practising physician. There are recipes which contain remarks such as ‘as physicians know how’ and ‘add a sufficient amount of honey,’ rather than detailing the whole of the preparation of a medicine”—evidence of the expectations of his audience. The book also reveals that Bald was no “slavish copier of the masters of medicine,” as is evident in the book: “he often omitted parts of his sources or added to them, he rearranged, he expressed opinions, he selected with an eye to what was important to his society, he offered substitutes for exotic drugs.” 5
Bald opened up English medicine to the wider world, but his success was limited, and England remained intellectually insular. Bald’s work must have been considered important at one time, because the only surviving manuscript we have was written well after the author’s death—someone thought the old book was valuable enough to copy. But that attitude eventually changed, and Bald exerted hardly any influence on posterity.
There was, however, a center of medical inquiry that was much more vigorous and influential. Just as early medieval Europe lagged behind Islam in its knowledge of geography, it paled in comparison with Muslim knowledge of the natural world. Bald’s book, however seminal, looks unsophisticated when put next to a work published not long afterward.
The Persian polymath Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Sina Balkhi’, better known in the West as Avicenna, lived at the end of the tenth century and beginning of the eleventh and was one of the most wide-ranging minds of the Islamic world. A physician, poet, musician, astronomer, and politician, he has 450 books to his credit, with demonstrated expertise in a dozen fields of knowledge—among them astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Of all of his areas of knowledge, though, medicine was the one for which he was most renowned. He was therefore ideally suited to compile the Qanun , a compendium of cutting-edge knowledge not only on medicine but on hygiene, on mental well-being, and on humanity’s place in the natural world.
We know more about Avicenna than about most other early compilers of reference books thanks, first, to an autobiography he wrote covering his first thirty years, and then to a biographical sketch
Some of the “cures” have less to do with medicine than with magic—the agate, for instance, is a powerful talisman. As medical historian Debby Banham points out, “Early medieval medicine was not that effective in actually curing anyone.” All of this was long before the advent of evidence-based medicine. Still, that does not mean the prescriptions were useless. Many of the “medicines” probably provided at least some liquid to help the dehydrated, and some calories to give strength to those who had been weakened by some ailment. As historian Audrey Meaney argues, the Leechbook “is by far the most comprehensive and best organized of all the Old English medical compilations… . The system used to sort and classify all this material must have been extensive and was usually also very efficient.” 4
These are all things Bald related directly; he also managed to speak indirectly, revealing things about Old English medical practice. As Cameron observes, “we find phrases which give an idea of what was expected of a practising physician. There are recipes which contain remarks such as ‘as physicians know how’ and ‘add a sufficient amount of honey,’ rather than detailing the whole of the preparation of a medicine”—evidence of the expectations of his audience. The book also reveals that Bald was no “slavish copier of the masters of medicine,” as is evident in the book: “he often omitted parts of his sources or added to them, he rearranged, he expressed opinions, he selected with an eye to what was important to his society, he offered substitutes for exotic drugs.” 5
Bald opened up English medicine to the wider world, but his success was limited, and England remained intellectually insular. Bald’s work must have been considered important at one time, because the only surviving manuscript we have was written well after the author’s death—someone thought the old book was valuable enough to copy. But that attitude eventually changed, and Bald exerted hardly any influence on posterity.
There was, however, a center of medical inquiry that was much more vigorous and influential. Just as early medieval Europe lagged behind Islam in its knowledge of geography, it paled in comparison with Muslim knowledge of the natural world. Bald’s book, however seminal, looks unsophisticated when put next to a work published not long afterward.
The Persian polymath Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Sina Balkhi’, better known in the West as Avicenna, lived at the end of the tenth century and beginning of the eleventh and was one of the most wide-ranging minds of the Islamic world. A physician, poet, musician, astronomer, and politician, he has 450 books to his credit, with demonstrated expertise in a dozen fields of knowledge—among them astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Of all of his areas of knowledge, though, medicine was the one for which he was most renowned. He was therefore ideally suited to compile the Qanun , a compendium of cutting-edge knowledge not only on medicine but on hygiene, on mental well-being, and on humanity’s place in the natural world.
We know more about Avicenna than about most other early compilers of reference books thanks, first, to an autobiography he wrote covering his first thirty years, and then to a biographical sketch
Similar Books
