Bald’s Leechbook contains some of the best Mediterranean medicine from the 3rd to the 9th centuries, so the learning was by no means isolated. Bald’s Leechbook, Leechbook III and Lacnunga are the most complete texts, all of them in the British Library. ![]() The oldest surviving medical documents in Old English are from the 9th century, but there is evidence that older texts were not all in Latin. But there are frequent records of practices which are eminently sensible and probably effective. Sometimes the presence of an odd superstition colours the whole, for example in a fairly accurate account of foetal development, which ends by suggesting that a foetus unborn after the 10th month could be fatal to the mother, but mostly on a Monday night. Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England was a complex mix of charms, the remnants of classical theories and practice, pragmatic folklore, and faith-healing despite a longstanding reputation for worthlessness, it was perhaps more based on observation than the reliance on astrology and the theory of humours that marked the medicine of the later medieval period. īald's Leechbook (London, British Library, Royal MS 12 D XVII, ff. Here the author describes for us the state of Anglo-Saxon medicine.
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