A medieval remedy for MRSA is just the start of it. Powdered poo, anyone?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/06/ninth-century-remedy-mrsa-powdered-poo

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Earlier this week, we learned that researchers at Nottingham University, having “recreated a ninth-century Anglo-Saxon remedy using onion, garlic and part of a cow’s stomach” were then astonished to find it almost completely wiped out the superbug, MRSA.

The news was certainly music to my ears. Over several years of discussing corpse medicine with different people, I had found that one of the most common questions was: “Did it work?”

“Bald’s eyesalve” is remarkable for the fact that it worked without being disgusting. And yet for those who could overcome their revulsion, historically some corpse medicines may have been effective. In the days of Shakespeare, numerous surgeons or physicians would press or sprinkle powdered Egyptian mummy, powdered blood or powdered moss of the skull onto a bleeding wound. This probably did work – but only because powder stimulates coagulation. The forensic pathologist who explained this to me added that, when his little brother suffered a bad head cut in childhood, their mother simply put powdered coffee on the wound.

Meanwhile, when various genteel patients with nosebleeds thrust powdered skull-moss up their nostrils, any benefits were probably no different from those who used chalk or mint, or the “noble German, cured of a desperate bleeding at the nose” by the insertion of warm hog’s dung.

By contrast, when Robert Boyle, the “father of chemistry”, stopped his own severe nosebleed one summer by merely holding skull-moss in his hand, he may have been experiencing a psychosomatic, rather than strictly physical effect.

Then we have human fat. Often sold and applied by public executioners, this was used extensively on wounds and sores, and remained popular as part of an ointment for gout or rheumatism well into the Georgian era. Although we probably don’t need clinical trials to convince us that many fats can produce the warming friction helpful against gout and rheumatism, there might well be more to learn about the action of fat against wounds and sores. Kathy Stuart, a historian, has suggested that it may have been used to save the wounded from amputations in early modern Germany. Come 1889, the German settlers of Pennsylvania were still using dog fat, skunk fat and bacon fat on wounds, while in the 1950s a Peruvian anthropologist, Efraín Morote Best, found that “the fatty tissues of human bodies are still valued in the region for their therapeutic effect on wounds, rheumatism” and smallpox scars.

Not all medicines derived from the human body involved a corpse. It was common practice for many surgeons to urinate on a wounded patient, and given that urine is sterile when it leaves the body, this would typically be a cleaner option than most of the water on offer. Returning to eye-salves, we learn that Elizabeth I’s surgeon, John Banister, recommended for “any bloody suffusion in the eye” a mixture including hen’s blood and human breast milk. As Elaine Leong has shown, human milk was one of the most popular remedies featured in the medical recipe collections of aristocrats, including Lady Elizabeth Grey. People used it time and again for eye problems: a Mrs Stanhope, for example, tells of successfully treating “my own child Arthur” with milk for inflammation of the eyes. As Dr Valerie Fildes points out, the physician John Caius (of Gonville & Caius college fame) was given milk directly from the breast during his fatal sickness in 1573. Deriving this fluid from one of numerous paid wet-nurses would probably not have raised an eyebrow in the 17th century (the recent fracas about breast milk ice-cream in Covent Garden suggests times have changed in that respect).

Still, given the choice of ingredients from that great portable medicine chest, the human body, most of us would probably choose milk, urine or blood over Robert Boyle’s treatment for cataracts. This required you to take some human excrement; dry it into powder and then blow it into the eye. Meanwhile, people living around Mitchelstown, Ireland around 1740 were probably often treated by their local minister, John Keogh, a man who swore that “the dung of an infant pulverized … taken ... for several days, quite eradicates the epilepsy”.

Once we come to epilepsy, we are all too often firmly in the territory of disgusting medicines that did not work. Why, for example, did hundreds of epileptics in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia swallow fresh blood at the execution scaffolds from the 16th to the late-19th centuries? In many cases, probably because blood was held to be the seat of the soul, and epilepsy – with its radical disruption of consciousness – a disease of the soul. Then again, given how intensely taboo the condition has been for most of history, it may often have been desperation that drove some epileptics to eat the testicles of a bear, pulverised camel’s brain, a young dog, maggots from a rotting sheep’s nose or earthworms during coitus (yours, not theirs). If this did not appeal, they could also drink the blood of a cat, as well as the urine of a black horse, the blood of their father or mother, or wine with woodlice in it.

Last but not least, we have the disgusting medicine that did not work and may well have killed you. Because the Egyptian mummy was so popular and valuable as a medical commodity, various opportunistic traders in Alexandria were soon cooking up fraudulent substitutes, prepared from the flesh of dead lepers, beggars or camels, but prepared to look like the genuine article. Writing in Science News in 2004, Barb’ra Anne Carter of California State University argued that certain micro-organisms instrumental in the transmission of plague can survive for some time in recently dead corpses.

The overall message of the Nottingham find must surely be that you should not simply dismiss a recipe because it is old and cheap to prepare – any more than you should automatically trust Robert Boyle, just because he was the father of chemistry. There are many interesting possibilities buried in the forgotten history of corpse medicine, and some may also be worth trying out in the lab. For now, however, my solicitor’s advice is very simple: do not try any of this at home.