
Bald's Leechbook Now Online – 10th century Anglo-Saxon medical recipe compendium - benbreen
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2016/01/balds-leechbook-now-online.html
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onedognight
Is it possible for these old remedies to matter today? For an investigation
into this and for a story worthy of HN to boot listen to / read the transcript
of this RadioLab podcast.

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/best-
medicine/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/best-medicine/)

~~~
jobu
That episode was pretty interesting, and it gives a whole new perspective on
traditional medicine and science.

TLDR - a microbiologist and a historian decided to try a very old cure for a
stye (staph infection in a pore of the eyelid). After brewing it and testing
it several times it proved to be extremely effective against staph (including
MRSA).

Why did the cure stop being used? Likely the same problems we're facing today
- resistance. After nearly 1000 years of disuse, the cure has become effective
again as staph has lost that specific resistance.

~~~
benbreen
As an historian of early modern medicine I absolutely love the historical
component of this story and I trust the microbiologist's expertise regarding
the efficacy of the cure. But I'm extremely skeptical about the resistance
claim. First off, what evidence do we have that this cure was ever widely used
in Anglo-Saxon times? We'd require not just its presence in Bald's Leechbook
but the 9th century equivalent of actual treatment records, or some kind of
material/archeological evidence like remains of this specific cure in drug
jars (which so far as I know don't exist). Second, Anglo-Saxon England was
basically a backwater in terms of the total human population of the time and
was not particularly well integrated into larger global networks. If the cure
was present in a Tang Chinese text or even something from northern Italy or
the Byzantine Empire, it would be more convincing that it would have had far-
reaching epidemiological effects, but with the existing evidence I think it's
a huge leap to assume that it actually was used to treat enough people
successfully that it resulted in widespread resistance.

Anyway, I still really enjoyed the Radiolab piece about this (I love that they
met at a Viking re-enactment!) but I think the implications of this have been
really distorted in the popular press. We'd need to know an order of magnitude
more about the global disease environment in Late Antiquity to actually make
any guesses about the impact of this cure at the time it was set down.

