Medieval treatments could make you question the mental health of doctors of the time, but a new exhibition should take visitors to the minds of these doctors and reveal the method behind what can look like madness.
Curious Cures, opening on Saturdays At the University of Cambridge library, is The highest point of a project To digitize and catalog more than 180 manuscripts, mainly dating from the 14th or 15th centuries, which contain recipes for medical treatment, collection of remedies with alchemical and guides texts towards healthy life.
Among the exposed elements are surgical diagrams inducing Wince, illustrations such as Zodiac Man – which represents different body parts associated with the star signs – and the recipes themselves, as well as translations.
What is clear is that if people in the Middle Ages had to face many of the same ailments that patients have known today, they addressed them quite differently.
One of the exposed manuscripts, dating from the 15th century, suggests that women can cure their infertility by burning beletticles in a pot with mouse ears – a type of Lubu world – to create pessaries that are placed in the cervix for three days.
“After these three days, however, she should have sex with a man and she should design without delay,” said the manuscript.
Another recipe suggests heal lice using a mixture of mercury and roasted apples.
However, while certain remedies may seem wisdom to modern eyes, Dr James Freeman, conservative of the exhibitionsaid it was a false idea of considering medieval medicine as based on blind tests and errors, or total superstition.
“Medieval people have thought of things,” he said. “They are intelligent, rational, curious and intensely interested in trying to understand how the body works and what caused and what could cure the disease.”
In an attempt to help visitors enter the minds of medieval doctors, the exhibition explores how people of the time thought that the body worked, including the idea of the four humours that was developed by Doctor Romain Galen.
“In fact, there was a very elaborate and sophisticated system of thought in which doctors worked,” said Freeman, adding that if the use of animal parts may seem strange and improbable, it should be seen in its context.
“Medieval people lived in a world in which creation had been conceived by God and all the plants and animals placed there for the benefit of man,” he said, adding that there was also a “sympathetic” medical idea that things that correspond to parts of the human body would therefore be beneficial for them.
“Consequently, I suppose that belette testicles are used as part of a remedy for infertility,” said Freeman.
However, Freeman noted that many recipes do not give a source or justification, with some – such as apple and mercury healing for lice – apparently depending on personal experience or hearsay.
The exhibition also explores the role of astrology and even magic in medieval medicine, and highlights the way people of time considered death. Among the exhibitions, there is a brass friction of a plate ordered by the Oxford Academic Sir Ralph Hamsterley, before his death in 1518, representing his wrapped skeleton shouting and asking for prayers for his soul.
The fan of doctors is also covered, revealing that, as well as educated doctors, members of religious orders, barbers, apothecaries and treated common healers, with women among people known to practice medicine.
However, Freeman said that his work on the exhibition had not yet inspired to try his medieval remedies himself.
“It made me happy to be alive in the 21st century, for all our current problems,” he said.