Читать книгу Medicine in the Middle Ages. Extracts from "Le Moyen Age Medical" by Dr. Edmond Dupouy; translated by T. C. Minor онлайн

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To the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages we must attribute the prejudice that, the human body being in direct connection with the universe, especially the planets, it was impossible for physical change to occur without the influence of the constellations. Thus astrology came to be considered as an essential part of medicine. This belief in the influence of the stars came from the Orient, and was carried through Europe after the crusades.

As to the treatise on “Diseases of Women,” attributed to Trotula, a midwife of the school of Salerno, it is only a formulary of receipts for the use of women—baths in the sea-sands under a hot sun to thin ladies suffering from overfat; signs by which a good wet-nurse may be recognized: a method of kneading the head, the nose, and the limbs of new-born children before placing them in swaddling clothes; the use of virgin wine mixed with honey as a remedy for removing the wrinkles of old age.

“The Commentaires of Bernard de Provincial informs us,” says Daremberg, “that certain practices, not only superstitious but disgusting, were common among the doctrines of Salerno; one, for instance, was to eat themselves, and also oblige their husbands to eat, the excrement of an ass fried in a stove in order to prevent sterility; likewise, to eat the stuffed heart of a diseased sow in order to forget dead friends,” etc.