Weastel and Cerato testicles: revealed medieval doctors fertility treatments
A new exhibition offers a look at the unusual and sometimes bizarre medical practices of the Middle Ages.
THE Cambridge Exhibition of the university library, Curious care: medicine in the medieval worldIt shows medieval manuscripts that detailed treatments ranging from the commonplace to truly peculiar, including an alleged care of infertility derived from the Donnole testicles.
Dr. James Freeman, the curator of the exhibition, explains that the manuscripts “bring you to the medieval bedside and reveal the strange and surprising things that doctors and healers have tried to bring their patients back”.
To help modern understanding, many of the historical recipes have been translated for the exhibition.
One of these examples, translated from Latin, comes from a fifteenth century manuscript compiled by a friar by Carmelita. It describes in detail a suggested infertility treatment to help women conceive.
He says: “Take three or four testicles from Weast and a half handful of Ear for the young mouse (a plant also known as Chickweed) and burns all in the same way in a terracotta pot.
“Subsequently, it grinds and combines with the juice of the grass mentioned above, and then creates soft pills in the manner of a hazelnut core, and put them so deeply in the private parts that touch the uterus, and leave each other for three days, during which it should completely abstain from sex.
“After these three days, however, it should have sex with a man and should conceive without delay.”
Dr. Freeman said that medieval medicine “was not simply superstition or test and blind errors”.
He said: “He was led by elaborate and sophisticated ideas on the body and influence on it of the wider world and even the cosmos.
“The wide variety of manuscripts in Curious care It also shows us that medicine has not been practiced only by doctors instructed at university, but by monks and friars, by surgeons and their apprentices, by drugs and herbalists, by midwives and women and men in their homes. “
The manuscripts taken from the collections of the University Library and by the historical colleges of Cambridge will be on display.
There will also be rotating astronomical tools, surgical diagrams and some of the first anatomical images in Western Europe.
A particularly surprising manuscript contains illustrations of “vein man” and “zodiacal man”, illuminating the way in which medicine and astrology have been intertwined in medieval times.
One of the most beautiful manuscripts on display belonged to Elizabeth of YorkQueen of England, wife of Enrico VII and mother of Henry VII.
This richly enlightened book contains a copy of the Reluctance of the bodyA guidance to healthy life originally composed two hundred years earlier for a French nobleman from his personal doctor.
It was written in French, the language of the royal and aristocracy and spread rapidly in western Europe.
“Such a detailed health regime was out of reach for everyone except the richest,” said dr. Freeman.
“However, the medical recipes that have been added later on the back of the book use the same spices and the common herbs that are repeatedly found in books of more common recipes.
“There is also a recipe for a laxative powder, which makes you wonder about the diet of Elizabeth and Henry!”
The free exhibition will open to the public on March 29 and will last until 6 December, with essential pre-prenotation.
