Medieval Medical Books Could Hold the Recipe for New Antibiotics

There may be real science behind ancient remedies

A recipe for an eyesalve from Bald’s Leechbook (© The British Library Board, Royal MS 12 D xvii)

For a long time, medieval medicine has been dismissed as irrelevant. This time period is popularly referred to as the “Dark Ages,” which erroneously suggests that it was unenlightened by science or reason. However, some medievalists and scientists are now looking back to history for clues to inform the search for new antibiotics.

The evolution of antibiotic-resistant microbes means that it is always necessary to find new drugs to battle microbes that are no longer treatable with current antibiotics. But progress in finding new antibiotics is slow. The drug discovery pipeline is currently stalled. An estimated 700,000 people around the world die annually from drug-resistant infections. If the situation does not change, it is estimated that such infections will kill 10 million people per year by 2050.

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This is definitely worth investigation

People did these things because they worked. Even leeches have been reintroduced to remove blood from wounds, and bleeding (now in the form of blood donations) helps men and post-menopausal women avoid the accumulation of excess iron (a cardiovascular disease risk) in their blood.

"Maggie the Maggot" as depicted by Sergeant Harper (Daragh O'Malley) in the Sharpe series starring Sean Bean is quite useful for cleaning wounds because maggots do not apparently eat living tissue, but only dead tissue. https://www.livescience.com/17554-maggots-clean-wounds-faster-surgeons…

Henryk Sienkiewicz's trilogy about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth says wound dressings of spider silk and bread were used in the 17th century. There is a scientific basis for this as well. http://news.psu.edu/story/140808/1995/09/01/research/arachnicillin

There is enormous interest in some rain forest plants (as depicted in the Sean Connery movie Medicine Man) that have bioactive compounds that can be used for medicinal purposes. The things people did long ago, even if they seem unscientific today, are worthy of investigation because many if not most of them probably got results.