����ý

When you’re feeling unwell, you may get a little TLC at home until you feel better, or seek expert medical advice to help you back to your old self.

What you probably won’t do, is look to the remedies used in the days of medieval medicine. Take a trip back five centuries with ����ý Bitesize as we look at the methods physicians employed then - but remember these are medical practices which definitely belong in their own era. Please speak to your GP if you're a bit poorly rather than trying any for yourself!

Keeping a sense of humours

Two names who featured heavily in medieval medicine were Hippocrates and Galen. Hailing from Ancient Greece, but working in different time periods, both men retained their strong influence on medicine into the medieval era. Hippocrates had developed an idea known as the four humours, which Galen believed in too.

The idea was that our body’s health was largely based on the balance of four substances called the humours. These were phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile.

The theory was that, if a person developed too much of one humour, it would lead to illness. For example, a nose bleed meant there was excess blood in someone’s system, while a runny nose meant someone had too much… well, you’ve probably worked that out.

Treatment could involve the use of leeches to draw off any ‘excess’ blood or using something called a purgative, which helped clear the body of other fluids (we’ll leave that one to your imagination too).

Thanks to advances in science, we now know that we each have around 10 pints of blood in our body. The body will only replace it, via stem cells created by our bone marrow, when a loss is detected - such as the time after a blood donation.

The cure is in the stars

Astrology - using the positions of the stars and planets to predict the future - once had a part to play in medicine. In the Middle Ages, it was believed the movement of the stars had a direct impact on our health.

Different parts of the body were associated with specific astrological signs and the positions of the Moon and other celestial objects would, at times, dictate when certain procedures could be carried out.

Whereas today’s trainee medics have to get up to speed with books such as Gray’s Anatomy, physicians back then also had to know their astral charts. They used a book called the Valemecum which told them the best astrological time to carry out different surgeries.

This dependence on superstition was at odds with the practices of Hippocrates and Galen, and in the 16th and 17th Centuries, scientific ideas related to health were explored more fully. At least one remnant of medicine's reliance on astrology survives; the word influenza. Often shortened to flu, it is from a medieval Italian word related to a belief that some illnesses or epidemics were influenced by the stars.

Something miasmic this way comes

Miasma was also big news in medieval health. It was a theory that unclean air made people unwell.

Fears over miasma led to streets being cleaned in an attempt to purify the air. Some of the methods used seem a little unusual today, but some practices are also recognisable from the public hygiene our local governments take care of in the 21st Century.

Among the more unscientific measures, fires were lit to clear the air, with herbs and other substances added to the flames. Bells were rung and birds encouraged to fly around people’s homes to keep fresh air circulating, while people carried bunches of posies and other flowers to prevent breathing in ‘bad’ air.

Other strategies brought in by town leaders had more in common with today’s strategies, such as employing rakers, people who kept the streets clean. There were also punishments for people who threw waste (such as the contents of their toilets) on to the streets, while building public toilets for citizens was another move from towns wanting to tackle the issue.

Got gout? Get an owl

Animals sometimes found themselves included in the ingredients of a potential cure, such as this unusual remedy for gout, which would be seen today as unscientific and unethical.

“Take an owl and pluck it clean and open it, clean and salt it. Put it in a new pot and cover it with a stone and put it in an oven and let it stand till it be burned. And then stamp [pound] it with boar’s grease and anoint the gout therewith.”

In the 21st Century, a doctor would prescribe a course of medication for gout, rather than a recipe which isn’t unlike a potion described in a children’s story.

It’s perhaps worth remembering that treatments from the Middle Ages involving honey and linseed are still in use today. Leeches are still used by the NHS in some procedures, particularly in burns and reconstructive surgery units, so these centuries-old practises endure in some ways.

It shows there are threads which bind the medicine of the era to modern life, but it seems the days of our star sign determining when we have a bad tooth removed are far, far behind us.

This article was published in November 2022.