Thousands of unedited medical recipes – from a gout cure that involves stuffing a puppy with snails and sage to a cataract treatment that uses the gall bladder of a hare – are to be published by Cambridge university library.
Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries is a two-year project to digitise, catalogue and conserve over 180 medieval manuscripts from the university’s library, the Fitzwilliam museum and a dozen Cambridge colleges.
The manuscripts date from around the 14th and 15th centuries, though the oldest is 1,000 years old, and a substantial number are written in Middle English. They include 8,000 recipes for medical treatments, as well as various scientific, alchemical, legal, literary, liturgical and devotional texts. Cambridge University library said a “substantial number” are in centuries-old bindings, with some of these books needing “urgent conservation” before the process of digitisation can begin.
The recipes include a number of common or garden ingredients, as well as more “curious or questionable components, in particular those deriving from animals”, said the library. Some of the ingredients include dove faeces, fox lungs and eel grease. One treatment for gout involves stuffing a puppy with snails and sage, roasting it over a fire and using the rendered fat to make a salve. Another gout treatment suggests salting an owl and baking it until it can be ground into a powder, then mixing mix the powder with boar’s grease to make a salve. A treatment for cataracts instructs the reader to mix the gall bladder of a hare with some honey before applying it to the eye with a feather over the course of three nights.
Dr James Freeman, who is supervising the project, said: “These recipes are a reminder of the pain and precarity of medieval life: before antibiotics, before antiseptics and before analgesics as we would know them all today.”
The manuscripts allude to the gruesome ailments and injuries that afflicted medieval people – such as by including how to determine whether a skull has been fractured after a blow from a weapon – as well as day-to-day concerns that are relatable to modern society.
Dr Freeman said: “Behind each recipe, however distantly, there lies a human story: experiences of illness and of pain, but also the desire to live and to be healthy.
Some of the most moving, the manuscripts specialist believes, are “those remedies that speak of the hopes or tragic disappointments of medieval people: a recipe ‘for to make a man and woman to get children’, to know whether a pregnant woman carries a boy or a girl, and to ‘deliver a woman of a dead child’”.
The project has been made possible thanks to £500,000 of funding from the Wellcome Trust. High-resolution digital images, detailed descriptions and full-text transcriptions will be made freely available online in the Cambridge digital library, opening up these collections to researchers around the world.
