Bald’s Leechbook must be the best name ever for an edition of Old English medical charms and remedies. I use a number of these medical recipes in Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife.

Bald’s Leechbook was the preeminent medical text of its day. Image: © The British Library Board (Royal 12 D xvii). See more here.

I would leave out an ingredient or two just so someone could not replicate such a recipe. Some recipes seem, from our modern perspective, “crazy.” For example, it is suggested that a woman who bleeds too much should find a horse “turd” and put it on a fire; she should stand over it to be fumigated by the smoke. I always wondered how someone would avoid being burned! So I wouldn’t try that at home.

But other recipes and folk remedies may have been efficacious, and not just as placebo effects. After all, a tea made of willow bark is said to cure headaches–aspirin is synthesized from elements occurring in the willow plant. Many recipes involve chanting charms. Music therapy is said to be curative; the charms and their rhythms might have had a healing effect.

A recent Radio Lab story, Staph Retreat, that you can read here, tells a fabulous story.  A scholar in Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, Dr. Christina Lee, combined her expertise with Dr Freya Harrison, a microbiologist. Dr. Lee translated one of Bald’s recipes, consisting of “a mixture of garlic, onions, wine, and bovine bile salts, all of which were then brewed in a brass cauldron and let sit for nine days.”

We can learn from our Anglo-Saxon forebears, not just in literature, but medicine as well.

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