Delving into some medical history today with an excerpt from Henry of Huntingdon's herbal (an old fashioned medical dictionary....sort of)
3.13 Horseradish, Armoracia rusticana Gaertn. Mey & Scherb
Do you want to remove a tumour? Take a frog and tie it to the tumour; the tumour will drink up the whole frog so that you'll marvel that just a dry skin remains in the morning. After this is removed, a Horseradish root, the urine of a cow, and the flower of wheat will kill all the tumour's strength.You'll thus clean out a wound as you clean other wounds, just as red Cabbage and the rose madder which they call varenca will do. Add cannabis and also yrigeron, which is called Groundsel, and the leaves of Wormwood; this is called the Five-Herb Medicine.
Taken from - Henry of Huntingdon, Anglicanus Ortus, A verse herbal of the twelfth century, ed. by W. Black (Oxford, Bodleian Library: 2012)
Henry of Huntingdon bio:
D. E. Greenway, ‘Henry (c.1088–c.1157)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12970, accessed 12 Sept 2014]
Henry (c.1088–c.1157), son of a clerk and archdeacon of
Huntingdon, is commonly called Henry of Huntingdon and his title
appears to have come from the title of the archdeaconry of his father to which
he eventually succeeded.
He was a great writer and well known politically nationally
and locally which left him well placed to write his Historia Anglorum (The history of the English people) which was
eventually 10 books long and covered Caesar’s invasion up to the coronation of
Henry II in 1154. According to the Oxford DNB, “The Historia Anglorum has a moral purpose, presenting a strongly
thematic narrative in which the five invasions of Britain—by the Romans, the
Picts and Scots, the Angles and Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans—are seen as
five punishments or plagues inflicted by God on a faithless people. The account
of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is focused on the setting up of seven kingdoms, a
concept—the heptarchy—which was adopted by later historians, and survived until
it was discredited in the 1980s”
An important chap I'm sure you’ll agree.
In addition to his history book, he wrote many others including a 6 book long series (Anglicanus Ortus - The English Garden) on various plants set out as though the narrator is considering the contents of a flowerbed. The following extract caught my eye. Horseradish - not just for beef and fish!
Do you want to remove a tumour? Take a frog and tie it to the tumour; the tumour will drink up the whole frog so that you'll marvel that just a dry skin remains in the morning. After this is removed, a Horseradish root, the urine of a cow, and the flower of wheat will kill all the tumour's strength.You'll thus clean out a wound as you clean other wounds, just as red Cabbage and the rose madder which they call varenca will do. Add cannabis and also yrigeron, which is called Groundsel, and the leaves of Wormwood; this is called the Five-Herb Medicine.
Taken from - Henry of Huntingdon, Anglicanus Ortus, A verse herbal of the twelfth century, ed. by W. Black (Oxford, Bodleian Library: 2012)
Henry of Huntingdon bio:
D. E. Greenway, ‘Henry (c.1088–c.1157)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12970, accessed 12 Sept 2014]
No comments:
Post a Comment