Medieval medical know-how:
“John of Gaddesden (1280-1349), physician to Edward II and compiler of the encyclopaedic Rosa anglica medicinae [The English Rose of Medicine], recommended reciting the gospel over an epileptic patient while bedecking him with peony and chrysanthemum amulets or the hair of a white dog”
(From Roy Porter’s excellent The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p.112).
I wonder which chapter of the gospel works best.
But at least the manuscript is pretty.
Gaddesden may or may not have been a model for the physician in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
Related:
My posts on the history of medicine: appalling infant mortality numbers, Schubert’s early death, the Iatrochemists on anemia, the “Knife Man,” Barry Marshall’s self-induced ulcers, medical politics in ancient Greece, the great Semmelweis, John Snow and the London cholera plague, debates over bloodletting, and more.