Are you one of those people who are fascinated about the lives of regular, everyday people who lived long before us? When you pop a frozen dinner in the microwave, do you ever get sidetracked by thoughts of how hungry you might have been had you been born in the way-back-when? Especially if feeding yourself involved having to actually raise, grow, kill, store and then cook something that had enough nutrition to keep you strong enough to do it all over again the next day?
Or, have you ever had a nasty stomach bug and been grateful for the simple luxury of indoor plumbing and ginger ale? If it never occurred to you, imagine yourself doubled over with stomach cramps and trying not to poop yourself while making a middle-of-the-night run to the outhouse, dodging skunks and wolves and then cleaning your backside with an old Sears catalogue. And, in spite of the ick factor, an outhouse still might be better than using a chamber pot and keeping the disgusting thing by your bed for the duration of your illness. Of course, if you decide to imagine yourself wealthy, you could avoid that particular nastiness by ordering your multitudes of servants to empty and clean it after you’ve befouled it, but still……
How did people back then cope? It couldn’t have been easy.
I’ll admit to a couple of occasions where I paced my house for hours holding a colicky baby and spent a minute or three envying all those Victorian mothers who just gave their babies morphine or opium and then went to bed for a solid nine hours of sleep, waking up rested and refreshed, the sun shining, the scent of honeysuckle drifting in through the open windows, and oh, look! There’s Cinderella’s little cartoon bluebird on the window sill, singing to a sweetly cooing bundle of joy who shows no sign of either colic or opium hangover (not to mention drug addiction).
OK. Back to reality.
There’s a tendency for people to overlook or ignore the past: been there, done that, got the T-shirt, yada yada. But there’s real value in studying people and times long past and every now and then someone has a Eureka! moment that solves a modern problem. I’m thinking specifically about a ninth century recipe for “Baldseye salve” that called for onions, garlic, wine and cow stomach as a treatment for inflamed eyes.*
We know onions and garlic have some mild medicinal properties and alcohol has been used practically since time began to treat just about everything, and I have no earthly idea what purpose cow’s stomach might have served. Regardless, someone has just now – in this advanced year of 2015 – rediscovered that recipe and get this: it almost completely eradicated a MRSA colony in the lab!
Do you have any idea how many millions/billions of dollars have been spent trying to cure and eliminate MRSA? And someone just did it with onions and cow stomach using a recipe written a thousand years before bacteria was even discovered?
Wow! This. Is. Incredible! It’s huge! It’s bigger than huge!!
It’s these kinds of things that foster my fascination of the past and the ways it’s still applicable to the present. Well, that and the fact that a lot of stuff that went on back then was just plain “WTF were they thinking”!?!? And so, so funny.
If you stumbled here in search of scholarly articles on the history of medicine or mankind or whatever, sorry. You’ll need to go somewhere else. I’m not a scholar, a science writer, or a historian. I’m just a curious nurse who enjoys history, especially when it’s a little on the more “earthy” side. (See above: outhouses vs. chamber pots).
So if you’re like me and you relish a little irreverence, gross history, weird tales, old medical cures and maybe some rare, legitimate enlightenment regarding the past, welcome! Stay as long as you like.
Taronna
*Bald’seye Salve Recipe
Equal amounts of garlic and another allium (onion or leek), finely chopped and crushed in a mortar for two minutes.
Add 25ml (0.87 fl oz) of English wine – taken from a historic vineyard near Glastonbury.
Dissolve bovine salts in distilled water, add and then keep chilled for nine days at 4C.
Body of Knowledge College 