VI
If not in every village, at least in every châtellerie, there was a doctor, a surgeon or a barber surgeon;[38] the labourers appear to have used their services freely and to have rewarded them with liberality. One of Bonis’ day-labourers falling ill, sends to Montauban for the physician of the place, and pays him for several visits the sum of 4 sols 2 deniers—which we may compare to nearly £1 15s. of our money. Another pays his doctor as much as 18 sols, say £3 12s. And in the Accounts of Bonis we find frequent mentions of drugs and medicinal spices of an expensive sort, sold to the agricultural labourers of the district.
The doctors of the Middle Ages and later, even so late as the middle of the fifteenth century, were chiefly inspired by the theories of the Arabs. Louis XI., as we know, ordered the Paris University to copy in extenso the great work of Aboo Bekr ibn Zacaria er Razi, the famous physician of the tenth century, whose masterpiece, El Mansoori, is a compendium of Arabian therapeutics. This book, commonly known as “Razi,” was very popular throughout the fourteenth century. A copy of it, bought by Bonis for four livres, assisted him in the preparation of his drugs, and of the plasters, unguents, electuaries and tisanes especially in request among a fourteenth-century rural population.
It may be interesting to examine a few of the remedies employed. Rheumatism, that special misery of those that work in the wintry fields, was treated externally by the application of a plaster of cordials and aromatic gums spread on a thin piece of silk. The part affected was also rubbed with an ointment (costing seven sols) made of four ounces of turpentine and two ounces of white wax, one ounce of resin, one ounce of myrrh, two ounces of bol d’Arménie, and two ounces of oil of roses;[39] it was then covered with a sheet of wadding. Complaints of the skin were treated by an unguent composed of a quarter of a pound of marsh-mallow, a quarter of a pound of white wax, a quarter of a pound of olive oil, an ounce of incense, and an ounce of turpentine; medicated baths were also recommended. Sulphur was freely used. Aniseed was given as a specific against indigestion, with camomile, Quassia amara, camphor, and essence of cinnamon. Coughs and colds were cured by a sudorific tea of rose and camomile; by a milk of almonds mixed with starch and sugar, almost exactly resembling the delicious looch of modern France: by an infusion of pectoral flowers (mallow, violet, &c.), as well as by lozenges of gum arabic and barley sugar[40]. In severe cases the physicians of the Middle Ages administered the famous theriac of Nero, the Theriacus Andromachi, composed of opium powdered with some tannic bitter substance, together with sulphate of iron, and some two and forty active aromatic essences, such as turpentine, Cingalese cinnamon, valerian, citron, rose, etc.[41] A labourer at Bloxham, in Oxfordshire, was treated for bronchitis in 1387, with a syrup of oxymel and squills[42]. Disorders of the intestines were pretty generally combated by starch water, alum, and the astringent bol d’Arménie. Senna tea was also an ingredient in the humblest medicine chest. Besides the remedies we have mentioned, cordials of cinnamon, camphor, resin, and oil of pinks, electuaries of liquorice, dried prunes, and honey of roses were constantly employed. Oxide of zinc mixed with camphor[43] was also given, but I do not know in what especial case. The hot bath and the vapour bath were highly esteemed, though less frequent, perhaps, than in the earlier Middle Ages, when hot baths were hourly cried through all the streets of Paris. Still, in the fourteenth century there was no town in any way considerable without at least one établissement de bains. We find in the Registers of the Châtelet that a hot bath was a somewhat expensive luxury, costing several sols. The prolonged warm baths in honour at the Court of Charles VI. were a scandal to the Church, and are denounced in a famous sermon of Jacques le Grand.
Besides the remedies we have quoted, it must be allowed that others more fantastic were occasionally used. Last week, at Aris, a little boy informed me that I need never suffer from migraine, for I could tie a live pigeon on my head, and let it depose its excrement on my hair: a certain remedy. He assured me also that his sister, whom the doctor from Vic had declared to be dying from congestion of the lungs, had been saved by the presence of mind of his mother: she slit up a live cat, placed half the palpitating creature on the back, half on the breast of the patient, who immediately recovered. Doubtless these medicines were known in the fourteenth century. An equally absurd but more elaborate sort were used especially at court and in the treatment of great personages. But our agricultural labourers, who thought twice before they changed their silver sou, though they may have split up a cat, were not accessible to fashionable quackery. In all the Accounts of Bonis, we find only two receipts that are patently unreasonable; and these are the most expensive. One of them is a powder of ground seed-pearls, the other an ointment of honey of roses, olive oil, white wax, pounded with “half an ounce of mummy.” But the cold creams and cosmetics of the present day are not always conspicuous for science; we might find nostrums as inefficacious on the shelves of Madame Georgine Champbaron. And, indeed, it may be doubted whether the most fantastic remedies of the Middle Ages were not sometimes as successful against the nervous maladies in which they were most often used, as the Lourdes water, the hypnotising-mirrors, and the various patent medicines so capriciously infallible in our century. The poor and needy, with their humble, painful, everyday disorders, knew, then as now, the virtues of friction and wadding against lumbago; the peppermint tea that calms the colic; the plaster of boiled poppy-heads applied against the raging tooth. The old man, struggling with his asthma, had almost as good an opiate; the feverish child, tossing under its doubled blanket, a potion almost as sudorific, as we should find in any country place to-day.
Apart from their special virtues, the medicines of the Middle Ages had a very high hygienic value. They were unusually powerful prophylactics. In an article on the “Workmen of Paris,” published some years ago in the Fortnightly Review, I quoted from the Annales of the Institut-Pasteur a series of experiments made by MM. Cadiac and Meunier establishing the microbicide effect of Cingalese cinnamon; while the oil of pinks, the essences of valerian, thyme, citron, rose, etc., employed in almost every mediæval recipe, are each and all more hostile to the microbe than the iodoform treatment employed against typhoid fever in the Paris hospitals to-day. I advance this assertion with all due discretion, since I have never made any single experiment, and am not in a position to control the opinion of experts; but since the vanguard of science admits so high a value in the drugs employed by our benighted ancestors, we may allow that the pleasantries in vogue on the subject are possibly overstated or misplaced.