Rewriting Life Medieval apothecaries used recipes with significant antibacterial properties, researchers say. by Emerging Technology from the arXiv August 1, 2018 The Lylye of Medicynes is a 15th-century manuscript residing in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. It is a Middle English translation of an earlier Latin treatise on disease, containing case studies and treatment recipes. It was an influential text thought to have originally belonged to Robert Broke, personal apothecary to the English monarch Henry VI. Recommended for You Kelvin Droegemeier may soon be America’s new top science and technology policy advisor Waymo’s self-driving cars will serve as a link to public transit Why Uber put the brakes on its self-driving trucks The $2.5 trillion reason we can’t rely on batteries to clean up the grid DARPA has an ambitious $1.5 billion plan to reinvent electronics The Lylye of Medicynes is very familiar to historians who study medieval medical treatments. They have long known that some recipes contain ingredients, such as honey, with antibiotic properties. But the broader question of the efficacy of medieval medicine in general is much harder to study. “The pharmacopeia used by physicians and lay people in medieval Europe has largely been dismissed as placebo or superstition,” say Erin Connelly of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues from the University of Warwick in the UK. Now that view looks set to change. Connelly and company say that medieval recipes followed a rational pattern of treatment that stands up to modern medical scrutiny. Their evidence comes… [Read full story]
Leave a Reply