Medieval medicine and prescriptions will be digitized and freely accessible to all

How did medieval physicians use pigeon feces, fox lungs or eel fat? This and much more will be revealed thanks to a new project by the University of Cambridge, which has launched the digitisation and preservation of 180 medieval medical manuscripts from its library collections. More than 8,000 medical prescriptions will be accessible to anyone via the internet. High-resolution scans of the manuscripts will be accompanied by transcripts of the texts with keyword search capabilities and detailed descriptions of the historical context.

Alchemical treatises, devotional and liturgical or literary and legal texts will be digitised.books and, of course, medical texts, including the detailed composition and production procedures of home remedies. The texts are written in Latin, French and medieval English. Most date from the 14th to 15th centuries, with the oldest manuscript being 1,000 years old. Some of the manuscripts are richly coloured and contain elaborate diagrams of the human body. One such describes, for example, the variety of colours, smell and taste of urine in relation to health.

Recipes are made up of lists of ingredients and instructions for their preparation. Most are based on familiar herbs, but some involve animal ingredients. For example, one recipe for treating gout involves stuffing a puppy with snails and sage, then roasting it over a fire. The trapped rendered fat is to be used to make an ointment. Another recipe calls for salting the owl and baking it until it can be ground into a powder. This is then mixed with boar fat to make a medicinal ointment. Rabbit gall bladder was to be used to treat cataracts, mixed with a little honey and rubbed into the eyes with a feather for three nights before going to sleep.

The Cambridge medical prescription texts form one of the largest collections of medieval medical writings. They are often used by scholars, but only a small percentage of those interested have had the opportunity to examine the books in person. Many are too fragile to be freely accessible. They need acute emergency preservation before they can be digitised at all.

Transcriptions will provide keyword searches, surveys of treatments for specific diseases, or quantitative analyses of individual ingredients or preparation techniques. Digitization will allow recipes to be traced in their original setting and context: where they were placed on the page, how they were presented, and whether they were added by different authors at different times. Digitisation will guarantee permanent access to the materials for future generations of researchers.

Manuscripts mention the terrible diseases and injuries that afflicted medieval people. "These recipes are a reminder of the pain and hardship of medieval life: before antibiotics, before antiseptics and before analgesics as we know them all today," said project leader Dr. "Behind every recipe, however remote, there is a human story: the experience of illness and pain, but also the desire to live and be healthy."

The manuscript specialist considers some of the most compelling "remedies that tell of the hopes or tragic disappointments of medieval people. For example, a recipe for getting a man and a woman to have children, how to tell if a pregnant woman is carrying a boy or a girl, and how to deliver a dead child in the womb."

"All scans produced by the library's digital content department, along with detailed descriptions and transcriptions produced by the project's cataloguers, will be published by the Cambridge Digital Library. We will make them available to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection," Dr Freeman concluded.

Roman Němec

Sources: cam.ac.uk, theguardian.com

Mining

A 16th-century diagram of the human body showing vein drop sites

Drawings of urine flasks

Description and picture of a vein-letting

High-resolution diagram of the human body from the 16th century showing the sites for urination