6 - Compilations in Old English

Summary

Of the three Old English medical compilations which survive in more or less complete condition, the one known as Leechbook III reflects most closely the medical practice of the Anglo-Saxons while they were still relatively free of Mediterranean influences. Bald's Leechbook, on the other hand, shows a conscious effort to transfer to Anglo-Saxon practice what one physician considered most useful in native and Mediterranean medicine. The third text, Lacnunga, is a sort of common place book with no other apparent aim than to record whatever items of medical interest came to the scribe's attention. In other words, of the three, Leechbook III can be taken to represent the oldest surviving strata of Anglo-Saxon medicine, Bald's Leechbook a sophisticated effort to incorporate the best of known medical practices into a physician's working manual, and Lacnunga a type of collection still being made by untrained and undiscriminating individuals whose chief interest to historians of medicine is that they keep alive a folk medicine which would otherwise have disappeared. We will examine them in turn, starting with Leechbook III.

LEECHBOOK III

If you cannot heal him with this you can never do so.

Of these Old English medical texts, the oldest vernacular medical writings to survive from Western Europe, Leechbook III appears to be least contaminated by Mediterranean medical ideas, so that in it we come as close as we can get to ancient Northern European medicine. Consequently, it deserves close study.