HERB - Re: treatment varieties and misconceptions

[Kathleen Keeler]

Jasmine wrote

> when it comes right down to it I think we perceive
> the time period as "backward" or "quackish". It doesn't occur to us
> that the medical information they had during their time was some
> of the best they could possibly have. They used things that you
> and I wouldn't even think of in our culture. And used them with
> success.

I resemble that remark.
Medieval medicine is not a single point but a continuum, and it, in my opinion
gets better later.  So I'll speak for 12th C England and France.
The medicine was maybe the best so far (don't know much about Arabs or
classical Rome) but
    No germ theory.  no reason to keep wounds clean.
    Anatomy still badly flawed: that blood circulates in the body, that the
heart pumps it,
that the brain is the center of cognition are post Period discoveries.
     Theory of 4 elements (Ptolemy):  its wrong. Things are not made of
earth air fire and water in some combination of two of them.  So treating
illnesses
as based on balancing humors is working from incorrect theory.  Pragmatically
you might get a cure, but you don't know what you are doing.
    Theory said disease came from the Devil, prayer cured.  I don't know how
herbs
fit into this if you were the churchman-healer.  He might have just let people
do their folk cures
to humor them.
    Following from the religious basis of disease is the doctrine of
signatures:
the plant is marked to tell you what it is used for, that God put no useless
plants on earth.
I don't hold this to be true:  there are useful plants for heart problems and
skin problems,
but that isn't reflected in plant structure.
   Reliance on authority not experimentation/observation is an important
difference too.  Period
theory said casting your horoscope could tell what is wrong, physicians really
didn't need to see the patient.  This is one of the things that the failure of
established medicine during the Plague Years changed the most.
    They didn't distinguish between the external and internal person.  You can
either
drink the decoction or spread it on the abdomen to cure an upset stomach
(etc.)  This is
more clear in Dioscorides and Macer than in Gerard. But then Gerard actually
post Period and is
described in botany books as a break through by being a book about plants that
is not
primarily medical but includes a lot of stuff about plants just because plants
are interesting,  & the
first book that includes plants without medical importance.
   And they couldn't diagnose internal stuff--xrays, cat scans--if you can't
see it on the surface
or feel it, they couldn't find it.

They did very well with the tools they had but there was lots they didn't
know.  And there is lots we
don't know still, but we've 350 years more study than Culpeper, 800 more than
Richard the Lionhearted's physicians (he died of a festering arrow wound in
April 1199).

And let me also add that I think there's been filtering in which Period
treatises are readily available.
There are medical works that are only available in microfiche that go on and on
with astrology and
medical treatment (Salmon's Astrological Physick).  Medical charms do occur in
Cockayne's translation and Macer has some really doubtful stuff.
The Medieval Lapidaries (Early English Text Society translation) reads a lot
like herbals saying
what diseases stones will cure, but includes a lot of nonsense (above and
beyond eating ground stones
for various ills).  Likewise we overlook the advice in Tacunitum Sanitatis that
doesn't match our modern views, but many of the "good for the elderly and
phlegmatic" are invalid by modern standards (even given my weak knowledge of
human physiology).  Gerard and Turner are all latest Period
and conserved and reprinted because the establishment approved of them
1700-1990.  Culpeper I'm less sure of: the astrology doesn't fit modern ideas.
Dioscorides, The one herbal you needed from 64 AD to 1800 is not readily
available, and, to judge by its uses of asbestos and mold from the gymnasium
wall in healing, contains much information we wouldn't use today.
Riddle in his 1987 book on Dioscorides' herbal checked treatments against
modern knowledge and
found a mix of probably effective and probably ineffective.  But he was also
making the point that
Dioscorides was rearranged when recopied to match the 4 elements model which
Dioscorides himself didn't buy. (ie Riddle thought Dioscorides better than
later works).

 So for all those reasons, I'd argue that medicine was pretty bad by modern
standards, even allowing for our tendency to think of ourselves as "wise" and
everyone before us as "foolish".

Are we seeing the same glass as half full and half empty?  I send people to
modern herbals for healing
because they're filtering out the stuff that doesn't work and if its healing
you want, go to the best possible sources.  Are you looking at the stuff in
between the stuff I want people to avoid?

This discussion prompts me to pull out facsimilie editions and do a line by
line analysis.  I will, but
it won't be this weekend.

Agnes

Agnes deLanvallei, Mag Mor, Calontir
O.L. (herbalism)  Dedicated to the study and safe recreation of Medieval uses
of plants.  If I can be of assistance in your studies, I'd be honored.
Kathleen H. Keeler, Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of
Nebraska-Lincoln
kkeeler1 at unl.edu



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