Multispectral imaging, proteomics, historical texts yield new insights into 16th-century medical manuals.
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Renaissance DIY science: People tested, tweaked home remedy recipes
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It would be interesting to know how many of these home remedies actually achieved anything. I suspect it’s not very high percentage. Because they were just anecdotes. But maybe?
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This was exactly my thought while reading the article. "I wonder how well, if at all, any of these remedies worked?" I assume not at all, or any positive benefit was the result of a placebo effect. I would still be curious to hear if there was any truth, even a grain, that they were on the right track. Or, at least, the remedies had a basis in logic if not effectiveness.
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It's surprising that researchers can unmask pseudonymous users with such accuracy.Stefan Hanss said:
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There has always been a large "Action Bias" in home remedies, and medicine in general... If you do something or not, most things will get better. Imagine a complaint, a rash or earache you are uncomfortable so you do something, you make a potion of dandelion root and borage flowers, and it resolved just a few days later...
That doesn't mean that nothing worked, those remedies that were better survived more iterations, in 2015 the Nobel Prize in medicine went to Youyou Tu who discovered an effective new class of antimalarial drug that was originally isolated from a folk remedy...
I suspect the efficacy of the vast majority of the formulas was much lower than we would accept as a standard of care now.
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Ooh, put some Lister's Carbolic Unguent on a wad of cotton. Put the cotton in her ear. That'll stop them shakes.
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Let's put this in context: literacy rates at that time in Germany were maybe 15%, so the target demographic here wasn't exactly your average hausfrau.
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Works great for all sorts of diseases, like dropsy, the grippe, scrofula, the vapors, jungle rot, dengue fever, poor man's gout, housemaid's knee, the staggers, dum-dum fever...
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Good article. I like reading weird news articles and they are getting harder to find.
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Not so very long ago there were no remedies that had been tested in a rigorous scientific manner. Physicians would train an apprentice and their experience would guide them along. Case studies were non-existent. The first medical schools didn't appear until the late 1700's and didn't become the norm in the US until the late 1800's. Lots and lots of suffering from a wide variety of medical issues went untreated in any real sort of way. The strange lady who lived alone at the edge of the village with a cat might be able to brew a tea that could possibly help...unless the priest had already gathered the rabble to burn her as a witch...
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Most of them were likely effective - at least for the day to day things.
Willow bark tea for headaches, and other kinds of pain. Foxglove for heart ailments. Certain mixtures that created what we call a "healthy biome" for digestive ailments.
And when it comes to "effective", that is a sliding scale for the day and age. If someone believed strongly enough that carrying a pebble in their pockets would help alleviate a toothache, then it probably did to some extent simply from the placebo effect.
The key difference is that back then, what worked, "worked". It didn't have to have a CLINICALLY effective effect. Just a perceptually effective effect.
That's where a lot of assumptions about medical interventions in the past fall apart. Some things that have no modern measurable clinical effect were "effective" to the individual back then.
So it really depends on what your definition of "effective" is. It's typically highly subjective, which accounts for the huge variety of different "cures" for the same general ailment.
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Thats nice and all but I heard you say something about a magic pebble that gives you healthy teeth? Does it cure existing toothaches, or is it strictly preventative? Do you think if you wore it in a pouch hanging from a chain around your neck, it would work better, because it's closer to your teeth? I bet it would...I'll tell you what, if you let me just check the pebble out for like a fortnight, I'll make sure you get the pick of the goats from the first three litters, just to say thanks. If the pebble does work, well I don't have to tell you, but that's worth a bit more than some goats and cows! Haven't you heard about the guy who invented the rock that keeps tigers from attacking you? He made billions of dollars, billions with a B! He didn't get to enjoy any of it, because he was mauled by a mountain lion; but thank God he had his rock! If it had been a tiger that had attacked him, he would surely be dead right now.
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13th century Lapidary of king Alfonso X provides good example. The book about magical properties of stones directly influences medieval alchemy as a kind of precursor to modern chemistry. As they had no deep understanding about underlying chemistry, they attributed the power of stones to stars, therefore medieval chemistry and pharmacology is related to astrology. Many of the recipes were discovered by experimenting and prolonged use, then written as verified.
- For example washing hair in mercury bath to kill hair lice. It works by clogging breathing tracheas while not too toxic for people (breathing vapors is different story).
- Another example is usage of vinegar and wine as basis for mouth waters to prevent bad odors and usage of pine/juniper resin to seal liquid transportation vessels (all 4 have strong antibacterial properties). Those resins were traditionally used to prepare plasters for treating open injuries probably since neanderthal times and such plasters can still be bought in Sweden, for example.
- Mouth waters were scented with pepper, mint, cinnamon, cloves. Cloves and mint have strong antibacterial properties too, in addition to pleasant smell.
Similarly medieval cookbooks (Andalusian, Syrian) speak about poisonous chemical interactions of copper dishes with acid meals and recipes for creating perfumes and scented mouth waters. According to Syrian cookbook, 13th century antiperspirants were crafted on basis of alum and Zinc oxides, this continues to present day.
Pharmacists were frequently consulting herbary books and they still remain treasure trove for finding new medicines, as noted above.
Medieval people were aware of the toxicity of some products and pharmacists were responsible for safe dosing during the preparation. They were preparing rat poisons as well as medicines, according to Siete partidas law code of Alfonso X (1265).
So there was lot of trial and error, writing down more useful recipes. Sometimes holding as trade secret, sometimes sharing with broader community.
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That sentence could really use some cleanup and editing, as it's quite confusing and doesn't make any sense.
First you state that "mass spectrometry‑based proteomics something something" where MS is general and includes all widely different mass spectrometry techniques. You forgot to state what exact MS fragment separation technique was used compared to GC/MS, since GC/MS (that you are comparing the "newcomer" technique to) is still only a subset of MS. That's like comparing fruit to apples, where apples are subset of fruit. Can't just say "the fruit newcomer is better than apples", can you?
Reading the paper, they used liquid-chromatography / mass spectrometry (with tandem MS).
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Traditional Chinese medicine was (is?) held in high regard by the CCP. Eventually this led to the examination of more than a million compounds. A few hits, many toxins.
An overview, with some references
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22330011/
The article, readable but not printable
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jebm.12420
An overview, with some references
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22330011/
The article, readable but not printable
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jebm.12420
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In the US, perhaps, but there are numerous medical schools in Europe going back to the Middle Ages, if not earlier. (Bologna, Padua, St Barts London, Montpelier, Heidelberg, Coimbra, etc.) They at least claimed to be rooted in what passed for rational thought at that time, even if they were fixated on the infallibility of Galen and Aristotle.
Edinburgh, founded in 1726, is one of the first in the Enlightenment, when observation and critical thinking were to the fore.
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Another thing to add to this is that while people traveled a bit during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, for the most part you were likely to stay pretty close to where you were born. So query how much the local diet (and/or gut biomes) would have influenced things leading to situations where a minor dietary deficiency could be corrected by a local remedy that was seemingly useless in other areas due to a more balanced diet.
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To be fair, being told to drink nothing but hot tea to help with a case of the runs effectively was guidance to boil all your water before drinking it, which probably would help.
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Maybe. Though I am not sure I would say "ANY".
Could be total quack in there. Then again, a number of herbal remedies have been used for millennia and we know they do work, and in other cases we are pretty sure they work, but no one had bothered to do a large study to figure out it.
St John's Wart has a few, very small studies and that is it, and they are mixed.
Feverfew does exactly what the herb is described as doing. It has historically been used for reducing fever (antipyretic) and also for treatment of headaches (which it is still used for sometimes). There are a number of studies, no large high quality studies. Most show it does reduce migraines or help prevent them. one study, that was also woefully small showed it was no better than placebo (from what I can find, the only difference between the studies that showed efficacy and the one that did not, is the studies that showed it worked used dried ground feverfew in capsules versus placebo, the one that showed it did not work used supercritical CO2 to extra "MIG99" in a repeatable and stable manner and then studied dosages in the milligram range).
Willow bark is used to treat pain, fever, muscle aches, and headaches. It is the base, salicin, where we later developed salicylic acid. It has also been used for millenia.
Chamomille does help with relaxation and falling asleep faster (studies show it does not improve duration or quality of sleep though).
Coffee and tea help with alertness and concentration.
Belladonna has a HUGE number of uses, traditionally and even today (it at least used to be where we get atropine from, I am not sure if that is the current source of atropine or not). Today used for cardiac treatment, but was and is still sometimes used for things like IBS, diarrhea, stomach disorders, etc.
Stinging nettle has a crap ton of uses.
So it isn't like there aren't some stuff out there that we suspect probably works, but we have better things and haven't bothered studying the not so good things in depth. Or...we just straight up continue to use them.
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When I had my wisdom teeth removed (I had 6) about a week later, I had the cavities from my lower 4 packed with gauze soaked in cloves to help reduce an infection I was just starting to get. It worked fantastic.
Other than the fact that anytime a little drop of the essence of cloves leaked out into my mouth it made me gag from how strong it was.
PS It was the orthodontic surgeon who did the packing, not some home remedy thing.
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Wintergreen/teaberry has a chemical precursor of the same chemical, and was also used to treat aches and pains by Native Americans and later European settlers.
The active ingredient is methyl salicylate. It's also present in relatively high quantities in birches, whose bark has also been used like willow bark.
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The fact that these are "medical recipes" is completely immaterial to the analysis. They only care that "this is a thing that somebody touched at some point, and then left alone".
Useless clickbait wordsalad trash, just like all"science" news.
Useless clickbait wordsalad trash, just like all
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Albino_Boo
Ars Praefectus
Its wasn't until the parallel development of epidemiology and the theroy of infectious diseases in the 19th century did medicine really advance. Even Paracelsus, who publicly burnt books by Galen, was stuck full of nonsense about astrology, demonology and divination. Paracelsus was taught up to the beginning of the 19th century. Medicine remained very much a pseudo science for far to long
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"For instance, studying the microbial species that congregate on works of art may lead to new ways to slow down the deterioration of priceless aging art. Case in point: Scientists analyzed the microbes found on seven of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings in 2020 using a third-generation sequencing method known as Nanopore, which uses protein nanopores embedded in a polymer membrane for sequencing. They combined the Nanopore sequencing with a whole-genome-amplification protocol and found that each drawing had its own unique microbiome."
Err, there is no case of any new way to slow deterioration of the art from these analyses. The Da Vinci drawing study article also suggested (in its subtitle) "Research could help slow down deterioration of aging artwork" but the article could report only "The researchers detected no visible biodeterioration on the drawing, apart from foxing stains". There's no new results about slowing or otherwise preventing deterioration in the current article.
Sure, maybe this research could help slow deterioration, but so far the research has actually demonstrated only that it can't.
Err, there is no case of any new way to slow deterioration of the art from these analyses. The Da Vinci drawing study article also suggested (in its subtitle) "Research could help slow down deterioration of aging artwork" but the article could report only "The researchers detected no visible biodeterioration on the drawing, apart from foxing stains". There's no new results about slowing or otherwise preventing deterioration in the current article.
Sure, maybe this research could help slow deterioration, but so far the research has actually demonstrated only that it can't.
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To add to others, Symphytum officinale. Especially extract processed to gel works pretty nicely. Longest used combination is with Camphor. Good for light to medium muscle and joint aches. Good for high volume treatment after exercise and training. For Manga/Light novel readers, this combination was used in Spice and Wolf to treat Holo's back and Kraft's face injury.
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It's also a CYP3A4 inducer, with potentially strong drug interactions. Which is always the danger with herbal medicines, plenty of them might have serious interactions with normal medicines.
Stockley's Herbal Medicines Interactions is the go‑to reference guide to them, albeit quite pricey. Then again, some interactions might not even be known.
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