
Medieval Wellness Tips - pepys
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/medieval-wellness-tips
======
DanAndersen
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.

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
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.

~~~
yobuko
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".

[1] [https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-the-templar-
knigh...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-the-templar-knights-ate)

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
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.

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justtopost
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.

~~~
gowld
2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine was for an ancient Chinese medicine.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou)

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blauditore
> If you doubt this’ll work, test it on a dog which is completely red.

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...

~~~
gnulinux
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).

~~~
LyndsySimon
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.

~~~
gnulinux
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].

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_rabies#USA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_rabies#USA)

~~~
gowld
Radiolab on a modern rabies case:
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/312245-rodney-versus-
death](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/312245-rodney-versus-death)

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suprfnk
They don't seem to be able to handle the HN traffic. Here's an internet
archive link:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180925110025/https://www.lapha...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180925110025/https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/medieval-
wellness-tips)

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starpilot
I still use many of these in my day to day life.

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chrisjack
>For a man who’s been painfully beaten

>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...

~~~
NeedMoreTea
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.

~~~
Tor3
Compared to all the rest, horse manure would be almost nice. It's not that far
from just grass, anyway.

~~~
jpindar
Unlike that of most other animals, I don't think horse manure is an
intrinsically unpleasant smell. It doesn't bother me.

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mscasts
> For to be invysybell

Someone should try it. It is proven! But the issue is, those who proved it are
long dead so we need some new evidence.

~~~
rebuilder
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!

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edmanet
Seems to be a lot of horse dung involved.

~~~
pcmaffey
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.

This is one big benefit of having a dog.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
> This is one big benefit of having a dog.

You get to eat its poop?

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shadofx
It eats it's own poop and then licks your mouth, or your fingers which you
then eat with.

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markatkinson
Not dissimilar to a couple modern wellness tips I have come across...

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castlecrasher2
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.

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AdmiralAsshat
Can Sleeping in Horse Shit Cure Your Bruises? The Answer May Surprise You!

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Medieval Housewife Discovers One Weird Trick For Curing Bruises - Grooms Hate
Her!

~~~
dkersten
I'd probably click on that.

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spicymaki
Mark my words, these tips will be on the Goop website by the end of the year.

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m23khan
This is awesome - the invisible trick really works!

Try it for yourself - you will see people staring at you but you will know you
are invisible!

~~~
sandworm101
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.

