Medieval potion made from onions, garlic, wine and bile from a cow’s stomach ‘can kill hospital superbugs’
Madlen Davies — Mail Online March 31, 2015
A thousand year-old potion made out of onions, garlic, wine and bile from a cow’s stomach can kill hospital superbugs, scientists claim.The potent 10th century brew – used by Anglo Saxons to treat a stye (an abscess on the eyelid) destroyed 90 per cent of the bacteria on scraps of skin taken from mice with MRSA.
Interestingly, the ingredients had little effect unless they were all brought together into the concoction, the study by Nottingham University researchers found.
Potion listed in a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon manuscript. Click to enlargeThe ancient remedy, called Bald’s eyesalve, originates from a manuscript in Bald’s Leechbook – an Old English leatherbound volume in the British Library.
The Leechbook is widely thought of as one of the earliest known medical textbooks and contains Anglo-Saxon medical advice and recipes for medicines, salves and treatments.
After using the solution on lab animals with MRSA – one of the most antibiotic-resistant bugs costing modern health services billions – the researchers described their results as ‘astonishing.’Associate Professor Dr Christina Lee, of the University of Nottingham, said: ‘Medieval leech books and herbaria contain many remedies designed to treat what are clearly bacterial infections – weeping wounds and sores, eye and throat infections, skin conditions such as the erysipelas rash, leprosy and chest infections.
‘Given these remedies were developed well before the modern understanding of germ theory, this poses two questions.‘How systematic was the development of these remedies and how effective were these remedies against the likely causative species of bacteria?‘
Answering these questions will greatly improve our understanding of medieval scholarship and medical empiricism and may reveal new ways of treating serious bacterial infections that continue to cause illness and death.’....
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