Medieval Medical Recipes : Medical treatises and recipes

Medieval Medical Recipes

We learn more about the scribe of the principal texts in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.8.2 than is usual for medical manuscripts. The scribe intervenes at the end of texts to tell us his name, Richard Tenet, and the titles of works he copies. Sometimes Tenet's attribution of authorship to these works is ambiguous (e.g. Bernard de Villanova) but he was clearly well acquainted with Salernitan medical literature of all kinds from antidotaria to uroscopies, much of it anonymous. Tenet was happy to copy parts that interested him of longer works whether in prose or verse. His compilation probably dates to after 1422 and was possibly written in Oxford. We know that Richard Tenet was a Carmelite Friar and it is clear from his annotations to texts in the manuscript that he practised medicine himself. The medical texts in this manuscript written by Tenet fall into five broad groups. First comes a lexicon of names of herbs (or synonyma) in Latin with Middle English equivalents. Second, there are texts on different kinds of medicaments and the illnesses for which they can be used. Third, there are texts on diagnosis from urine (five) and pulse (one). Fourth, there is a remedy book written in Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman, lacking its beginning, and possibly not complete. Finally there are two anonymous texts on pestilence, the second of which is unfinished. This collection of texts was assembled and written by Tenet because of their immediate relevance to medical practice. It is Tenet's added notes, often identified as 'experimenta', which speak most clearly to his own medical practice. Sometimes these are in the margin and Tenet would occasionally write vertically instead of horizontally in these blank areas. The first notes (in the text block rather than marginal) occur at the end of a section De urinis mulieris (On women's urines), which appears to belong to a longer treatise on urines. There is a series of notes by Tenet's hand which are comments on how to diagnose from a woman's urine when she is pregnant. These notes seem to be independent of the text itself and take up most of a page. After the last such note come what Tenet calls 'experimentum 1' and 'experimentum 2', and these are different recipes for plasters to be applied to the right side in case of overheating of the liver (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(71);return false;'>32r</a>). Similarly, on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(145);return false;'>71r</a>, where the text deals with the use of clysters or enemas, Tenet adds notes in the bottom margin about when and how to use clysters, but also the use of medicinal bathing. On f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(164);return false;'>80v</a>, where the text is an analysis of colours of urines, Tenet adds notes below about identifying the urine of a virgin, of a woman who has sex with men, or of a menstruating woman. He refers to an authority, 'In libro magistri Roberti scribitur quod...' ('In the book of Master Robert it is written that...'), although this is not readily identifiable.There are many more such experimenta in the margins of the remedy book part of Tenet's manuscript from f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(165);return false;'>83r</a> onwards. They include remedies for bruising (citing the Practica of Iohannes Platearius), aids to sleep, ways to lose weight, and notes on identifying kinds of dropsy. There is an 'experimentum probatum' (proven experiment) against poison of all kinds which says, 'Write these three words on pieces of bread with a pen: "max . nax . pax", and give the patient one piece to eat on the first day, two on the second, three on the third, saying "in the name of the father, of the son, and of the holy ghost" if you give it to a human, "in the name of the saviour" if to an animal' (f. 83r, bottom margin). Another experimentum on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(169);return false;'>85r</a> (bottom margin) is a method for finding the body of a drowned person using a red stick anointed with the blood of the nearest relative; the stick is then used as a divining rod over the water. Here Tenet is proposing a kind of natural magic of sympathy, though he does go on to recommend a method of bringing the drowned person back to life by hitting them on the back while they are suspended over the girth of a horse until they spit out water. This will work as long as a day has not passed since the drowned person fell in, we are told. The manuscript is densely written in tightly packed long lines, and the margins often crowded with further additions. In a couple of places, however, the text is provided with illustrative diagrams, again by Tenet's hand. One shows the correspondence between the elements, humours and times of the year and parts of the world (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(148);return false;'>72v</a>), as befits an Oxford-educated student of natural philosophy. The urine flask on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(75);return false;'>36r</a> shows the four regions of a sample to be examined as discussed in the various urine texts. There is a medieval foliation in the manuscript which makes clear that some leaves are missing (ff. 13-14, 24-25, 32-33, 81-82 in this sequence). There is a partial index to remedies, general and pestilential, on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(36);return false;'>13v</a>, written in the foliating hand. The manuscript was no doubt used by subsequent medical practitioners of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a quarry for remedies. On f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(140);return false;'>68v</a> are a group of recipes by various fifteenth-century hands. The second one for palsy is attributed to Gilbert Kymer (d. 1463), physician in the household of Humphrey of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Gloucester. Kymer recipes are also to be found in <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-JESUS-Q-G-00012/1'>Cambridge, Jesus College, MS Q.G.12</a> and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-JESUS-Q-G-00025/1'>MS Q.G.25</a>.Peter Murray Jones Fellow of King's College, Cambridge