>Take cudweed and boil it in fine ale, and drink it first thing in the morning and last thing at night; and make the patient a bed in a pile of steaming horse dung, and lay him in it.
Sleeping in a pile of horse sh*t... I don't see any hygenic problem with that, let alone the smell...
London, and other towns and cities, had a bit of a shit problem in the 1300s. Streets full of horse and human shit, households throwing their waste into the streets and/or river or if lucky selling it to a nearby cloth dyer, water dangerous to drink so best stick to beer or wine, the serious health risk from floors covered in rushes. OK, if you were posh enough there was a chute from the privvy straight into the moat or river. Oh and the river was where the leftovers from the slaughter houses went.
I think it's fair to say that smell and hygiene expectation was a little different in the middle ages. Cured, if wealthy enough, with a pomander - a ball full of nicely smelly herbs and oils that you carried as portable gas mask.
You don't need academic knowledge of anatomy if you grow up in a culture (that of medieval peasants) where hunting, cleaning, and cooking animals was likely common. Much can be inferred from analogy, in the way the non-human dissections were (and still are) used for training surgeons.
Probably. Clearly if you happen to have a butcher at hand to get you the liver. Not sure if nowadays you could just bring a random dig to a butcher and ket him extract the liver for you - might be hygienic standards preventing to do it. Earlier might be the belief that dogs are dirty etc. but i don’t know...
It is not that dumb.
Eating camel dung for example helps with serious stomach infections, its old and well known Bedouin trick (tested by Wehrmacht soldiers in Africa during WWII).
Apart from parasites and bacteria shit could be beneficial in theory - as its full of minerals and could help to regenerate skin etc.
Humans are one of the only animals that don’t eat poop. The benefits of poo exposure is an increased diversity of gut bacteria and biome, which we are just starting to understand the benefits of.
Given the hygiene standards in the middle ages, humans were very much exposed to poop of all kind of sources, so I doubt that additional exposure would be of any benefit.
Maybe an old phrase meaning "rabid dog" or "raged dog". Rabies was probably orders of magnitude more common of an occurrence back then (which is non-existent in most Western countries right now).
I know at least in Shakespeare's day (and I would presume also in middle ages) gold was considered to be a shade of red, so Golden Retrievers would also have to watch their back.
Rabies isn't that uncommon in the US - uncommon in domestic animals, sure, but I shot a likely rabid skunk a couple of weeks ago. It was out during the day, was walking at an angle, and was aggressive toward me.
That's actually completely correct, I don't know how I missed that when I wrote my comment. I've never seen a rabid animal, but I know that in the US, squirrels and bats are still a significant vector of rabies virus. It's probably not a good idea to play around with wild mammals.
EDIT: From Wikipedia:
> In wild animals, bats were the most frequently reported rabid species (30.9% of cases during 2015), followed by raccoons (29.4%), skunks (24.8%), and foxes (5.9%)[29].
Apropos of nothing, several Southeastern states are currently releasing rabies vaccine in food packets to cut down on the incidence in raccoons and other wild animals.
I had a racoon walk right through my open front door that was likely rabid. Looked like he was drunk and staggering, aggressive but not quite there. Ended up chasing it back outside with a piece of copper pipe since it was blocking the way to my varmint rifle.
The reference to a Red Dog is likely to refer to the saying "seeing red", so yes a rabid animal can probably also be inferred just like Stags shed the velvet from their antlers exposing the bloodied red antlers at the start of the rutting season (a violent act to win over females) as seen here. https://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-6206553/Stunning...
Overall a red dog is almost likely to mean a dog that is angry for some reason.
It is probably hard to find a dog that is completely red, so there is no way to verify the cure beforehand. People must have thought the cure was rubbish even in medieval times.
I read somewhere here on HN that medieval colors weren't precisely accurate. I wonder if red also meant brown or reddish-brown and dogs like the Rhodesian Ridgeback would qualify.
I suspect that some context has been lost. 'Invisible' probably doesn't mean literally transparent. It may mean invisible to God, a free pass for sin. That would dovetail with the other powers of this device.
Sometimes I'll be reading a blog with what I think is decent health advice then suddenly that stupid feet-to-body-parts diagram appears and I have to actively forget what I just read.
We should keep in mind that these tips are specifically chosen because of their unusual and laughable nature, and so should refrain from attempting to generalize about the nature of medieval medicine from a biased dataset.
Except that any historian of medicine will tell you that pharmaceuticals well into the 18th century were dominated by ideas of "potency" where surely things would have beneficial effect because they have powerful smells or whatever. Uses of animal excrement are exceedingly common in early-modern remedy guides.
I remember learning from a historian that the use of animal excrement was used for all kinds of things; for example "curing" warts. The effectiveness was of course questionable, but that didn't stop people buying in to the hype of the day.
Someone else recently posted about the Templar diet[1], and I thought that was actually quite ahead of it's time. What I find most interesting is how they could have been so ahead of the times in terms of diet and hygiene compared to the "average Joe".
In defense of at least that wart remedy, a wart will turn green/black pretty much right away and then fall off relatively quickly if you keep it saturated with vinegar for a few hours here and there. I am willing to believe that some excreted waste materials could have a similar effect.
"Fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), also known as a stool transplant, is the process of transplantation of fecal bacteria from a healthy individual into a recipient. FMT involves restoration of the colonic microflora by introducing healthy bacterial flora through infusion of stool, e.g. by colonoscopy, enema, orogastric tube or by mouth in the form of a capsule containing freeze-dried material, obtained from a healthy donor. The effectiveness of FMT has been established..."
More common than they are today, but there may be survivorship bias happening here - I'd imagine church-housed manuscripts would have a higher chance of surviving into the present day than random texts not church related.
The recipe requires you to put frog bones in a stream and pick out the bone that moves against the stream... You might run out of frogs before finding such a bone!
I wonder if anyone is going through these old texts to discover things. Perhaps rabbit bile contains something unique. Always makes you wonder... thats all for now, got a warm bed waiting for me.
69 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] threadhttps://web.archive.org/web/20180925110025/https://www.lapha...
>Take cudweed and boil it in fine ale, and drink it first thing in the morning and last thing at night; and make the patient a bed in a pile of steaming horse dung, and lay him in it.
Sleeping in a pile of horse sh*t... I don't see any hygenic problem with that, let alone the smell...
I think it's fair to say that smell and hygiene expectation was a little different in the middle ages. Cured, if wealthy enough, with a pomander - a ball full of nicely smelly herbs and oils that you carried as portable gas mask.
Up through the 20th century.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...
https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/when-horses-po...
(1) side-effects may include nausea, vomiting and loss of sense of smell
Same reason why most 'magic potions' include hard to achieve steps (steal church parchments, estract the liver of a dog, etc.).
How are these "hard to achieve"?
Apart from parasites and bacteria shit could be beneficial in theory - as its full of minerals and could help to regenerate skin etc.
This is one big benefit of having a dog.
You get to eat its poop?
This really confuses me. Why does the dog need to be red? Also, if someone ever tested it, it should be obvious to not work...
You'd have to attach the parchment with the words to the rabid dog.... then attack the rabid dog with a sword, gun or any other weapon.
This seems inadvisable ;)
At "across the street" range it shouldn't affect accuracy very much
Should also eventual test to see if parchment attachment time matter, penmanship on the words, etc.
Gonna need a lot of parchment, rabid dogs... swords, etc.
EDIT: From Wikipedia:
> In wild animals, bats were the most frequently reported rabid species (30.9% of cases during 2015), followed by raccoons (29.4%), skunks (24.8%), and foxes (5.9%)[29].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_rabies#USA
Try it for yourself - you will see people staring at you but you will know you are invisible!
Someone else recently posted about the Templar diet[1], and I thought that was actually quite ahead of it's time. What I find most interesting is how they could have been so ahead of the times in terms of diet and hygiene compared to the "average Joe".
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-the-templar-knigh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant
Someone should try it. It is proven! But the issue is, those who proved it are long dead so we need some new evidence.
Sore from a beating are ya?
It's a shame they didn't have a cure for the uncomfortable feeling of having coffee in the sinuses!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou