Medicine in the Middle Ages

Folk medicine and magic

The studied physicians of the West provided only wealthy people in the Middle Ages - but poor people were dependent on practitioners: hangmen, herbalists or barbers. The subjects trusted Wanderheilern rather than the university doctors. It is difficult to draw a line between fraud, miraculous medicine and real remedies, because curious-looking medicine today corresponds to the world view.

The people declared themselves diseases with the work of evil spirits and magic plants helped against witch's curse. The root of verbena (Verbena officinalis) protected against curses. The black elder (Sambucus nigra) was predisposed to demonic diseases because it was where the good spirits of the house lived. The priests burned valuable frankincense from the East, but the people were smoking with Juniper (Juniper communis), thus dispelling the harmful spirits. Demons hated strong smells: garlic, wild garlic, fennel, valerian and dill kept away the plague charms. The garlic also kept the evil eye off. Sage (Salvia pratensis) purified the air in the dying room.

contents

• Folk medicine and magic
• The Merseburg spells
• Quack and wandering magician
• Blood and bile
• Lazy spell?
• Health care in the Middle Ages
• Healing executioners - executioners as surgeons
• Animal healers become werewolves
• Persian medicine

The Merseburg spells

The theologians tried to sharpen the line between good prayer and superstitious magic formulas, but the incantations masked themselves again and again and broke through the Christian-made surface in the blessing of the saints.

The worm blessing was as ubiquitous in the people as the aspirin tablet today. From the Old High German we know it since the 9th century; but he comes from pagan times. Worm blessing and Merseburg spells are just as well structured as healing magic of Indian antiquity and Felix Genzmer called them therefore even "stone age primitive formulas".

The worm should be in the body with its nine children and cause the diseases. The spell drove him to the surface where the healer directed him into an arrow. The sorcerer then shot the arrow with the worm into the forest where the demons lived: the worm thus returned home, the patient recovered.

The Saxon worm blessing translates: "Go out, Nesso, with nine little ones out from the marrow to the bones, from the bone to the flesh, out from the flesh to the skin, out from the skin, into that arrow, Lord, it become like this. "

Making worms responsible for complaints is not a fool's idea. Tapeworms and roundworms, hookworms and lung parasites are scourges of humanity. From the itch in the anus to a long dying, worms torment in many ways, and it is no coincidence that our ancestors called the evil dragon a worm. The Wurmkunde, however, led to just as false as brutal therapies: From the state side was until the mid-18th century for rabies control the dogs to prevent the so-called rabies cut out of the tongue. This is a muscle that only the canids known as the main transmitters have. Cutting this rabies was an equally useless and unnecessary animal cruelty.

The second Merseburg spell is divine veterinary medicine. Baldur's horse has dislocated his bones. The other gods first try it with practical methods, then comes Odin. The magic of this god of magic succeeds, the horse becomes healthy. In the Middle Ages, the healers spoke the saying in short: "blood to blood, leg to leg, vein to vein, in the name of God."

Trained doctors were able to afford only wealthy sections of the population in the middle age. (Image: Erica Guilane-Nachez / fotolia.com)

Quack and wandering magician

Quacks sell medicine. Today, the term is the same as fraudsters. Quacksalber derives from mercury, because that was considered a cure for diseases. Salvia, however, can also come from the ointment or the sage.

The quacks belonged to the traveling people and therefore had a bad reputation alone. They also dealt with pus, dead tissue, and blood: this brought them near the dead magic. The humans hoped for their healing and distrusted them at the same time, they needed these toothpicks and bladeship cutters, because no one else eased their suffering. The heyday of these hiking and miracle healers was in the 16th century, while at the same time medicine prevailed as a science. Okulists stung the cataract and Steinschneider removed bladder stones. The folk song by Eisenbart reminds of Johann Eisenbart (1661-1727), who cured the "people after his kind". Bartholomäus Friederich described himself in 1602 in Cologne explicitly as a stone cutter and occultist and also sold magic arts. A true cheater was Cyriacus Vense from Hesse. He described himself in 1611 as "artz" and "break teeth off". He also sold a herb to help against sorcery. The effect allegedly unfolded the herb through his prayer, "I dig you, you wurtzell good, bluedt by our Lord Jhesu Christi kostlichs". He had received his knowledge from Henker Urban from Wolfenbüttel. The herb served the witch trial to see if there were any magic in it.

In 1545, the Council of Cologne ordered the medical school to examine the traveling doctors, as "frembde medici and cyrugi" roamed the city and treated people were "spoiled and miserable". Also, the resident "Empiricis", ie practicing physicians should only be allowed to treat when they had graduated from the university. This does not prove the charlatanry of the quack, but shows the competition between established and freelancers.

However, the quacks produced a lot of noise and smoke: Herbal essences such as rosemary oil came to panacea - meteorite rock, toad slime or petroleum. Apparent healings were caused by ingredients such as opium, whose intoxication briefly deafened. The "healing effect" was often suggestion, and if the bouncers noticed the deception, such scammers had moved on.

The quack doctors often made questionable curiosities among their healing utensils. (Image: Blackcat / fotolia.com)

As there were charlatans among the healers, there were also simulants in the sick. Infamous were the Grantner, who swallowed soap, and tumbled on the earth with foam in front of his mouth, hoping for alms. Also the pretending of blindness, missing limbs and physical disabilities counted to the tricks with the begging. Today's trip to India gives an insight into the sophistication of such practices.

Blood and bile

Blood was supposed to help against epilepsy and leprosy and has always been important as the essence of life. Already in ancient Rome, citizens were collecting the blood of beheaded men to heal these evils. In medical science, diseases were caused by unequal distribution of humors. Blood was assigned to Jupiter, the heart and the hot sanguine. Louis XI. drank blood for children to recover, but died anyway. The only way to get human blood legally was to buy from the executioner. "Poor-saint relics" of the bones of executed men were just as much a miracle cure as hangman's tools. Their effectiveness resulted from the belief in excess vitality of those judged before their natural end.

Strange meals left the passion burning. The Luster served food she had rubbed against her genitals, or bread, the dough of which she kneaded with her bared bottom. Fish suffocated in the vagina, drops of menstrual blood in the wine or pubic hair in the cake melted the longed for. Whether women really implement such methods, is put there.

But the lust of the man could also be killed with magic, be it out of revenge, because he got involved with another, be it to hold a raw furious offender. Testicles of a cock under his bed let the lust cool. Forty ants, cooked in nettle juice, made the man a eunuch forever. But this induced by magic damage impotence could be reversed: in the bedroom smoked fish gall or blown on the walls of blood brought the desire back to the loins.

Means of preventing conception were not necessarily rational. A magic ritual recommended moistening pear peas in the vagina of a menstruating woman, catching a frog, sticking the peas in its mouth, and then releasing the frog. Thereafter, the caster should moisten henbane in mare's milk, wrap mucus of a cow with barley in a deer's skin, sew it up in donkey's skin and wear it on the body as the moon wanes. The magic was better with the additional earwax of a mule.

Lazy spell?

The science of modernity saw in the magic magic superstition of a dark Middle Ages; Hippies as well as esoteric feminists, on the other hand, glorify the "old wisdom" of the "forces of nature". Both made a mistake: The scientists did not understand that a half-blinded Enlightenment is not one; the "nature lovers" idolize the miraculous beliefs of our ancestors rather than disclose the rational core. Sage and juniper, garlic and verbena, for example, have really healing properties.

Arrogance against the Middle Ages is wrong, because even we are not immune to lazy magic: money makers today benefit from the discomfort of "conventional medicine" and the sick expect a magical aura of the doctor: the white coat replaces the magical robe of the priest. The bourgeoisie put science in the place of the church, is just as pious and "science" often means propaganda: therapists receive their pay from pharmaceutical companies and invent "diseases" that fit perfectly with the medicine of their financiers. Plague and cholera, smallpox and syphilis, the "punishments of God" by our ancestors are defeated for the time being; But infancy such as age, femininity, as well as masculinity provide a gold vein for new disease cures. The menopause can be treated as well as puberty, and the Zappelphilipp is no longer considered changeling ghastly elves, but gets Ritalin. In the Middle Ages counted the "word of God", today can be sold any nonsense, if it is "scientifically proven".

Magic also arose from the desperation to find remedies - just as cancer patients today try everything to master the "demon" in their bodies. Sheep feces against the goiter or blessed gingerbread against wolf attacks showed the madness of the unenlightened? Not quite! Our ancestors raised mold on sheep dung and applied it to wounds. The fungi make penicillin, the main antibiotic. The people did not know that in the Middle Ages, but they recognized that the molds were healing. The magic healing also included the experience. The medical historian Wolfgang Eckart even speaks the holy gingerbread real effect. The wolf was considered particularly starving at Christmas and the cattle were endangered. The spice cake contained the precious cinnamon; Cinnamon, however, has an antibiotic effect and prevents "evil spirits", namely worms, mosquitoes and ticks. So scare off the wolf does not lack logic.

We stand before the Middle Ages like an ethnologist before a foreign culture. Like the subjects at that time, most of our contemporaries unthinkingly regard our society as the best of all worlds: promoting wealth and thus the health of all is not in the interest of the rulers today. In this they barely differ from the nobility and clergy of the Middle Ages. The anthropologist Marvin Harris rightly criticized: "Not unlike its medieval predecessor, the modern witches' mesh also serves to stupefy and confuse the forces of social progress." Miracle healers now gather their sheep in the middle class, who fear for their privileges ; doctors studied discover angels who redeem from all suffering instead of criticizing unbearable work. The demon is in the beer and the cigarette, which sweetens the malocher his end of work; it may not be the exploitation that brings it to an early end, and a burnt-out employee seeking his cure in the Daily Horoscope is more convenient than introducing humane working hours.

Health care in the Middle Ages

Preventive health care and medical treatment in the Middle Ages often seem odd from today's point of view. The reason for this is often not that people were stupider than they are today, but had completely different ideas about the origin of diseases.

The body was not considered a unit, as a biochemical organism, which the doctor repaired as an expert in disorders, as in modern medicine, but was in constant interaction between inside and outside: diseases could either divine (St. Valentins kranckeit, epilepsy) , demonic (werwolfery, melancholy) or natural (cold piss, urinary stoppage) causes. Calling on saints and demon exorcisms did not oppose drugs, but complemented them. Soothsayers were considered as reputable as scientific doctors. Even in magical medicine, the diagnosis was at the beginning. There was a way for every demon to fight it. A healer by the name of Johann Ravenich thought he recognized enchantment on the urine: "If urine brings hair, then dan is, but urine is white in the case, then it is cold, and if it is clar, it is heated "The Father Claes, known as Teuffelsfenger, healed with the words," Acha Fara, Fosa, Kruka, Tuta, Mora, Morsa, Pax, Max deus Homo, Imax. "

In addition, meaningful health care was known: the Middle Ages has the reputation of catastrophic hygiene, of cities that sank in the dirt and garbage, of stench and ubiquitous pathogens. That was also the reality. Similar to people in the dirt of today's Indian cities, people were aware of the danger of illness. For example, toilets in Cologne were only allowed to be cleaned at night, and good ventilation was a precautionary measure.

Those who had the opportunity moved to where the stench, garbage and thus the health burden was the least, away from the city centers or up. The social classes literally ran between above and below; the higher classes lived in the upper floors at a distance from the dirt of the street. Smelling apples and rose water should purify the air as well as smoked herbs, burnt juniper berries and laurel.

People drank wine and beer, not because the society consisted of alcoholics, but because they knew about the pollution of urban water. Also mineral springs were known. Which foods cause indigestion was as well known as the hangover after excessive alcohol consumption. The soothing effect of the bath prevailed in particular through the crusades. Wealthy families had their own bathroom, the public bathhouses were a social meeting place. Healing springs attracted visitors from all over the region and are still the center of health resorts today.

In times of epidemics, those who could afford it fled to the countryside. Although nobody knew what bacteria or viruses are, the risk of infection was known and this remedy, in principle, right.

Probably it was the failures in the treatment of illness that lifestyle and nutrition as health care had a much higher priority than in the modern age. There was no confidence in an almighty medicine that could cure every disease. Self-treatment was more important than it is today. Gastric complaints, skin inflammation and headache treated those affected mostly with home remedies. The wavered between meaningful herbal medicine on the one hand and meaningless means on the other hand. People should not be too arrogant today: The healing effects of many native plants have only been rediscovered in recent decades.

Healing executioners - executioners as surgeons

The executioner is a myth whose reality is surprising: the executioners, also called Schinder or Nachrichtener, not only executed but worked as wound and bone healers, earning corpses. Cannibalism was widespread.

Corporal penalties of the Middle Ages were anything but arbitrary, because they established in the understanding of law, the divine order. The bloody theater of execution was indeed suitable to reduce aggression of the masses; but the "art of right killing" followed a prescribed ritual. Foul, when a convict died of torture or bled to death after amputation quickly led to a ban on the profession, deliberate violation of punishment. An executioner who struck at decapitation ran the risk of becoming a lynching victim to the disappointed crowd.

Therefore, healing of wounds caused by torture, thumbscrews, mutilations, irises, or burn marks was just as important as punishment. Decapitations -free between two cervical vertebrae with the directional sword- required not only skill, but knowledge of anatomy, as well as stretching on the rack and braiding the condemned in a cartwheel. The evaluation of torture and thus a "medical" health diagnosis were subject to the judgment of the executioner.

Unlike the learned doctors, who were forbidden to open the human body, the executioner was legally dealing with dead bodies. Wounded people could be treated in his house. The sale of medicine was banned the Bavarian executioners until 1736. The hangman Hans Stadler worked with ointments, healing oils and plasters, used cupping heads and bloodletting, proving that he practiced the then "normal" medicine. He received medicinal herbs such as valerian, gentian and juniper from the pharmacist; the peculiarity of his "healing art" lay in the use of human skin and human fat. The executioner Franz Schmidt had allowed the Nuremberg council in 1580 to "cut the decapitated body, and take what, in addition to his medical, from it." With human fat for ointment, the Munich executioners supplied the pharmacies kilos. Human skin and human fat for medicines was not assigned to the magic area.

In contrast to the executions, the women of the executioners participated in the healing practice. Maria Salome alone treated the patients while her nursing acacia husband was dying.

The importance of the executioner as a healer lies both in his real knowledge and in the connection between medicine and magic. Execution developed from the human sacrifice to the gods; Items of the death ritual like the gallows trick were considered magically charged. The hangman was suspected of using the demonic powers of the dead for black magic.

Blood was supposed to help against epilepsy and leprosy and has always been important as the essence of life. Already in ancient Rome, citizens were collecting the blood of beheaded men to heal these evils. In medical science, diseases were caused by unequal distribution of humors. Blood was assigned to Jupiter, the heart and the hot sanguine. Louis XI. drank blood for children to recover, but died anyway. The only way to get human blood legally was to buy from the executioner. "Poor-saint relics" of the bones of executed men were just as much a miracle cure as hangman's tools. Their effectiveness resulted from the imagined life force of those judged before their natural end.

The hangman as a physician is by no means a phenomenon of the "dark" Middle Ages, overcome by the "light" modernity. In today's terror systems, doctors judge the torture of the victims. And in comparison to the physician and megamiller Josef Mengele, the hangmen of the Middle Ages were philanthropists.

Animal healers become werewolves

It was not until 1765 that the first veterinary school was founded in the German-speaking area in Vienna, and in 1778 the TIHO Hannover was established as a "Rosstierschule". Veterinary medicine diversified widely, as did human medicine in the Middle Ages and early modern times. Studied treated animals of rulers such as hunting falcons, ornamental birds, hunting dogs and riding horses. Executioners, butchers, skinners and shepherds took care of the farm animals.

The Arabs had preserved the knowledge of antiquity and dealt in particular with equine medicine. In Europe, the superstition that witches, demons and spells trigger animal diseases with meaningful medicine: Frederick II wrote in the 13th Century, the standard works for the healing of horses, hawks and hounds and is considered a pioneer of veterinary medicine, which drew conclusions from observations and questioned magic explanations.

A professional veterinary medicine began with the stable masters of the courtly studs: The health of the horses was not a hobby like the hunting falcons and grooms, the treatment of which hunters subject, but a decisive power factor. Horse searching and thus the collapse of the cavalry could decide wars. The professional horse doctors were employees of the nobility; this privilege shaped the conservative mentality of the profession well into the 20th century. The cautious, curious animal mother of small animal practice developed only in the last decades.

Castration served to fatten the animals. The meat of oxen and capons was considered tender; the meat of uncastrated boars is inedible. Geldings and oxen are tamer than uncastrated stallions and bulls. But Sauschneider also castrated sows to prevent fertilization by Wildeber, so understood themselves on surgery. The depredation was brutal, but simple. The grooms, farmers and shepherds severed the spermatic cord with knives or scissors, crushing the testicles with stones or tongs.

The butchers were responsible for meat inspection and live diagnosis. Skinner (Wasenmeister) and animal healer was often the same profession. The Munich steward Bartholomäus Deibler enjoyed such a reputation that he also cured the steeds of the urban upper class; the executioner Hans Stadler treated horses like humans with his herbal tea.

The scandal of the skinners is to be taken literally: The stench of cooked and often already decayed animal carcasses must have been unbearable. Especially in times of famine disgusting but played hardly a role. The skinners, carcasses, did business with carrion. Until meat inspection by official veterinarians, the meatiness of meat was a matter of the purse. As late as 1789, the skinner Adam Kuisl reported the meat from "kranck livestock" was delivered to the inns. In 1695, the Bavarian state authorities banned the sale of horse meat in order to prevent the skinners from selling carcasses and spreading diseases. Plague cattle did not produce any income for the coaters, as they were not allowed to use the skin, diseases such as anthrax were a deadly danger.

The shepherds faced the stable masters in the social scale of animal welfare. They migrated with honor and without rights to the herds in the wilderness, where the wolves and forest robbers had their home, as cattle thieves. Like the Skinners and Executioners, those who dealt with sick and dead animals were close to the nimbus of black magic.

The shepherd, excluded from society, entered the forbidden terrain of one's own sensory experience and found insights in the, in the literal sense, demonized nature of the healing effects of plants on sheep and goats; he experienced the self-healing powers of animals, was the bearer of ancient knowledge. Like his predecessor, the shaman, this outcast found knowledge in real nature, without the distortion of ecclesiastical dogma. He intensified the effect of medicinal herbs with ritual magic.

The farmers were contradictory to him. Just as executioners and barbers became the folk doctors, shepherds were the national veterinarians. Life in the wilderness and his handling of death were scary to the peasants, but they did not want to renounce his knowledge, neither his salvation albums nor his magic. The shepherds sold the Wolfsbane in addition to rational means, put a wards on the herds to keep the wolves away. A double-edged sword, because whoever is given the power to keep the wolves away has the power to rush them. Elmar Lorey writes: "If the village community felt threatened by the seer's personality, it could easily become a werewolf process."

The witchcraft spell got into the realm of the devil. The counter-medicine of the outsiders put the success of the omnipotence of the church in question. The Wolfsbanner became a werewolf, the helping shepherd a sorcerer who ate animal in the form of children. And shepherds who had been tortured to rage in pact with the Devil in Wolf form died at the stake. A "document" like the witch's ointment was easy to find, because ointments had the national vets enough. The shepherd Henn Knie from the Westerwald confessed that the devil had rubbed him with a sharp ointment, thrown him a white fur, and that he had been "so designed with his senses and thoughts (...) as if he had to tear everything down." The wolf he thought, to drive away, by baking a bread with the formula "To the poor Waldhund, I conclude to his mouth that he does not bite my cattle, or even attack." In 1587 a certain cows-Ludwig lost his head, 1591 became Knie burned. In 1600, Rolzer Bestgen was brought before the Witches' Court and executed as a werewolf: In addition to the Wolfsbane, he also used magic to heal tumors in horses and pigs. The old man actually threatened: he made his living by reading the gospel to swine. If he did not get any money, he cursed the wolves for foals.

From small and large animal practices to reptile experts and zoo veterinarians the spectrum ranges today, mostly women. These are joined by "veterinary practitioners" whose methods often seem curious. Few veterinarians know that their ancestors suffered as a werewolf at the stake.

Persian medicine

Persia is considered the cradle of modern medicine; and the Persian doctors were famous in the Middle Ages of Europe. The most important among them was Abū Alī al-Husayn ibn Abdullāh ibn Sīnā - and since the Europeans could barely pronounce it, they called him Avicenna. He lived from 980 to 1037, at the time of the fictitious "Medicus".

As a typical Persian scholar of his time, he researched in various areas: music theory captivated him as well as alchemy, astronomy inspired him as well as mathematics, and when he was not busy with legal issues, he devoted himself to poetry. However, his Qānūn at-Tibb, the canon of medicine, has remained famous to this day.

Ibn Sina gained less brand-new insights here, but excelled by his extensive insights into the healing arts of ancient Greece, Rome and Persia. He drew on a vast wealth of experience: Ancient Persia under King Cyrus was the first empire in history and ranged from Africa to Afghanistan. The first road network from Egypt to India, the decimal break, the root word of paradise and magic; the garden culture, the Arabic numerals, the crown of the king, the birth of the Messiah by a virgin, the angels, the date of Christmas, the wine at the sacrament, the Thousand and One Nights, the bishop's cohort, the cult of the Assassins - a lion's share of civilizations of the Middle Ages came from Persia; and the Persians were only too aware of it. The Persian scientists of antiquity were consumed by the spirit of Egypt and Babylon, India and China. Ultimately, even the Islamic Grand-Caliphate was a religiously interpreted variant of the Persian "King of Kings".

Although Islam suppressed the ancient Iranian Zarathustra cult, the "Islamic" scientists took over the findings of their ancient predecessors, while the church in Europe pursued the research of antiquity as an "idolatry". The Christian church took care of the "soul" - medical treatment and hygiene played a minor role, while the Persians attached great importance to personal hygiene. Since the Christian clergy regarded diseases as a work of supernatural powers, there was indeed for each suffering a patron saint and so from today's point of view, a psychosomatic placebo effect, but little pinpoint healing. In the seventh century, the church forbade even clergy to work as surgeons, so as not to endanger their soul; the "bone work" was later reserved for hangmen - ie amateurs who practiced 'learning by doing'.

Avicenna was not only a famous doctor, but his canon also summed up the medical knowledge of Persia. Instead of demons, he recognized the climate, the environment and infection as the culprit. He described, among other things, that tuberculosis is contagious. Many of his methods are still recognized today: Avicenna instructed surgeons to remove tumors early and cut out all diseased tissue. He even recognized the heart as a blood pump.

In the Materia Medica, Avicenna described several hundreds of medications and gave recipes for how to use them. He introduced - and that was unknown in the West at the time - rules on how to test a new drug before it came into use.

To this day, poetry is not as important anywhere in the world as it is in Iran, and in the Middle Ages the Sufis, who molded their mysticism into poetry, were folk heroes: the artful word was considered a remedy for the soul. Ibn Sina recognized the interaction of psyche and body, which we now call psychosomatic. While psychic disturbances in the Occident were regarded as a demonic obsession, he recognized as a mental suffering in humans, which causes people to be physically ill. Ibn Sina looked after the prince of Gorgan, who was lying in bed with a serious condition. He saw how the prince got excited when he heard the name of his lover. Instead of driving out demons, he recommended that the patient be united with his loved one. In the canon he wrote about the "lovesickness". Against the physical symptoms of melancholia was for him the best medicine music.