A new exhibition offers a glimpse into the unusual and sometimes bizarre medical practices of the Middle Ages.
The Cambridge University Library exhibition, Curious Cures: Medicine In The Medieval World, showcases medieval manuscripts detailing treatments ranging from the commonplace to the truly peculiar, including a purported infertility cure derived from weasels’ testicles.
Dr James Freeman, the exhibition’s curator, explains that the manuscripts “take you to the medieval bedside and reveal the strange and surprising things that physicians and healers tried to make their patients well again”.
To aid modern understanding, many of the historical recipes have been translated for the exhibition.
One such example, translated from Latin, comes from a 15th-century manuscript compiled by a Carmelite friar. It details a suggested infertility treatment to help women conceive.
It says: “Take three or four weasel testicles and half a handful of young mouse-ear [a plant also known as chickweed] and burn it all equally in an earthenware pot.
“Afterwards, grind and combine with the juice of the aforementioned herb, and thus make soft pills in the manner of a hazelnut kernel, and place them so deeply in the private parts that they touch the uterus, and leave there for three days, during which she should abstain entirely from sex.
“After these three days however, she should have intercourse with a man and she should conceive without delay.”
Dr Freeman said medieval medicine “wasn’t simply superstition or blind trial-and-error”.
He said: “It was guided by elaborate and sophisticated ideas about the body and the influence upon it of the wider world and even the cosmos.
“The wide variety of manuscripts in Curious Cures also shows us that medicine wasn’t practised just by university-educated physicians, but by monks and friars, by surgeons and their apprentices, by apothecaries and herbalists, by midwives, and by women and men in their own homes.”
Manuscripts drawn from the collections of the university library and Cambridge’s historic colleges will go on display.
There will also be rotating astronomical instruments, surgical diagrams and some of the earliest anatomical images in western Europe.
A particularly striking manuscript contains illustrations of “Vein Man” and “Zodiac Man”, illuminating how medicine and astrology were entwined in medieval times.
One of the most beautiful manuscripts on display belonged to Elizabeth of York, Queen of England, wife of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII.
This richly illuminated book contains a copy of the Regime Du Corps, a guide to healthy living originally composed two hundred years earlier for a French noblewoman by her personal physician.
It was written in French, the language of royalty and aristocracy and spread quickly across western Europe.
“Such a detailed health regime was out of reach for all but the most wealthy,” said Dr Freeman.
“However, the medical recipes that were added later at the back of the book use the same spices and common herbs that are found time and time again in more common recipe books.
“There is even a recipe for a laxative powder, which makes you wonder about Elizabeth and Henry’s diet!”
The free exhibition will open to the public on March 29 and will run until December 6, with pre-booking essential.
