A new exhibition offers a look at the unusual and sometimes bizarre medical practices of the Middle Ages.
The Cambridge University Library Exhibition, Curious healing: medicine in the medieval worldDisplay the medieval manuscripts that set out treatments, ranging from everyday to the truly peculiar, including an alleged infertility healing derived from Weasels’ testicles.
Dr. James Freeman, the curator of the exhibition, explains that the manuscripts “take you to the medieval bedside table and reveal the strange and surprising things that doctors and healers tried their patients again”.
To help the modern understanding, many of the historical recipes for the exhibition have been translated.
One such example, translated from Latin, comes from a 15th-century manuscript composed by a Carmelite Friar. It contains a proposed infertility treatment to help women conceive.
It says: “Take three or four weasel chin and half a handful of young mouse ear [a plant also known as chickweed] and burn it all equally in an earthwork pot.
“Grind and combine then with the juice of the above herbs, and thus make soft pills in the way of a hazelnut grain, and place it so deep in the private parts that they touch the uterus, leaving it for three days, during which she must remember completely of gender.
“After these three days, however, she had to have intercourse with a man and should be pregnant without delay.”
Dr Freeman said medieval medicine “was not just superstition or blind trial and error”.
He said: ‘It was led by extensive and sophisticated ideas about the body and its influence on the broad world and even the cosmos.
‘The wide variety of manuscripts in Curious healing We also show that medicine was practiced not only by university -trained doctors, but by monks and friars, by surgeons and their apprentices, by pharmacy and herbalists, by midwives and by women and men in their own homes. “
Manuscripts from the collections of the University Library and the historic colleges of Cambridge will be displayed.
There will also be rotating astronomical instruments, surgical diagrams and some of the earliest anatomical images in Western Europe.
A particularly striking manuscript contains illustrations of ‘Aar Man’ and ‘Zodiac Man’, which is intertwined in the Middle Ages how medicine and astrology are interwoven.
One of the most beautiful manuscripts to be seen belonged to Elizabeth of York, Queen of England, wife of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII.
This rich enlightened book contains a copy of the Body tea houseA guide for a healthy lifestyle that was originally composed two hundred years before for a French noble woman by her personal doctor.
It was written in French, the language of royalty and aristocracy and spread quickly across Western Europe.
“Such a detailed health regime was out of reach of all but the richest,” says Dr Freeman.
However, the medical recipes that were later added to the back of the book use the same spices and ordinary herbs that appear in more general recipe books again and again.
“There’s even a recipe for a laxative powder, which makes you wonder about Elizabeth and Henry’s diet!”
The free exhibition will open to the public on March 29 and will run until December 6, with prescription essential.
