12 - Rational medicine

Summary

At the end of the last chapter we asked: ‘What was the therapeutic value of these substances; could they be expected to have beneficial effects on the ailments for which they were prescribed?’ The answer has usually been: ‘No’. Charles Singer put it emphatically:

In the Early English medical documents there is no mention of the physiological action of drugs. There is no trace in them of any knowledge of anatomy or physiology … To estimate the therapeutic armoury of the leech it would be necessary to enumerate all the plant names in all the texts. The result of so tiresome a task would not repay the effort.

His pupil, Wilfrid Bonser, was equally emphatic: ‘One must not necessarily look in a prescription for any physiological effect which the ingredients might have had on a patient.’ In another context he wrote: ‘Sterile formulas, which could be applied without any exercise of reasoning, alone survived for use during the Dark Ages. It is these, therefore, with very few exceptions, which appear in Anglo-Saxon medical practice.’

If we rephrase our question more specifically: ‘Did ancient and medieval physicians use ingredients and methods which were likely to have had beneficial effects on the patients whose ailments they treated?’, then I think the answer is ‘Yes, and their prescriptions were about as good as anything prescribed before the mid-twentieth century’.

As we have seen, most Anglo-Saxon remedies were of plant origin. Even today, at least one-quarter of the drugs used in medicine are from flowering plants, or prepared synthetically to copy plant products.