[Sca-cooks] Charlemagne and the doctors

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2010, Antonia Calvo wrote:

> otsisto wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> 
>>> "His health was good until four years before he died, when he suffered
>>> 
>> from constant fevers.  Toward the very end he also became lame in one foot.
>> Even then he trusted his own judgment rather than the advice of his
>> physicians, whom he almost loathed, since they urged him to stop eating
>> roast meat, which he liked, and to start eating boiled meat."
>> 
>>> Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne, chapter 22.
>>>
>>> 
>> Yes- that's the quote that got me started on the whole thing of
>> wondering why his doctors insisted on boiled meats. (As it turns out, no
>> one tells the emperor what to do!) Have a brand-new copy of Anthimus
>> that I'm starting in on. Might get some illumination there. :-)
>> 
>> 'Lainie>>>>
>> 
>> Though I don't know if the physicians would have know exactly but could it
>> have been the carcinogens that roasted tends to have. Perhaps they had
>> associated the condition to the roasted meat.
>> 
>
> That sounds *wildly* unlikely.  We know that roasted meats were considered 
> "hotter" than boiled meats, and fevers are a disorder of excessive heat, so 
> recommending boiled meats over roasted would have been a no-brainer for an 
> early medieval physician.
>

What Antonia said. The proper way to cook beef to "correct" its nature is 
by boiling and serving with the proper sorts of sauces. The ancient 
physicians (of which Anthimus is considered one, as he was using sources 
like Galen) had no clue about carcinogens.

Also, Anthimus barely touches on humoral theory (I just read Anthimus a 
couple of weeks ago) so there isn't much useful about Charlemagne in his 
letter directly. There's some useful stuff in the intro, though. The 
sources you want for Charlemagne are Galen, Aristotle, Celsus, 
Hippocrates, Pythagoras, etc.

Margaret FitzWilliam