Ad vesice dolorem et ad eos qui urinam non faciunt (For bladder pain and when a person cannot urinate): nephrological disorders in Anglo-Saxon medicine.
The attitude of 19th century (and even of 20th century) scholars toward medieval and, particularly, Anglo-Saxon medicine has been of severe criticism. According to them it was filled with superstition and stupidities. However, in these last fifty years research has proved that, compared with the Continent, Anglo-Saxon England was not a backwater. At the end of the ninth century, medical compendia in Old English began to appear, similar in structure and contents to the Latin dynamidia and to the Latin herbals. These medical treatises were written in the vernacular of the Anglo-Saxons, not in Latin, the western European language for all significant and valuable works on medicine. Bladder, kidney and urinating problems are mentioned throughout the Old English medical treatises together with their cures, that is remedies from herbs and animals. These texts contain no theoretical reflections, only very concise descriptions of symptoms (pain in the bladder, in the kidneys, difficulty in urinating etc.), while prognosis is limited to affirmations such as "he will heal very quickly," "soon there will be no pain," "it will soon be healed," etc. Remedies are made basically out of a body of medicinal plants and materials which can be traced to Greek and Roman medicine. The remedies from plants reflect a wide rational and practical knowledge of medicinal herbs. As a matter of fact, not only there is no amuletic use of plants, but most of the herbs that appear in these recipes have diuretic or analgesic properties and have been in use for centuries.
D'Aronco
Maria A
MA
Department of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Udine, Udine, Italy. daronco@uniud.it
D029001:Herbal Medicine / Q000266:history; D049691:History, Medieval; D006801:Humans; D007674:Kidney Diseases / Q000266:history; D008374:Manuscripts, Medical as Topic / Q000266:history*; D009398:Nephrology / Q000266:history*