Medieval Medicine. James Joseph Walsh
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Evidently it was rather easy to commit such rhymes to memory, and this accounts for the fact that we have many different versions of the Regimen and disputed readings of all kinds. These medieval hygienists believed very much in early rising, cold water, thorough cleansing, exercise in the open air, yet without sudden cooling afterwards. The lines on morning hygiene seem worth while giving in Ordonaux’s translation.
At early dawn, when first from bed you rise,
Wash, in cold water, both your hands and eyes.
With brush and comb then cleanse your teeth and hair,
And thus refreshed, your limbs outstretch with care.
Such things restore the weary, o’ertasked brain;
And to all parts ensure a wholesome gain.
Fresh from the bath, get warm. Rest after food,
Or walk, as seems most suited to your mood.
But in whate’er engaged, or sport, or feat,
Cool not too soon the body when in heat.
The Salernitan writers were not believers in noonday sleep, though one might have expected that the tradition of the siesta in Italy had been already established. They insist that it makes one feel worse rather than better to break the day by a sleep at noonday.
Let noontide sleep be brief, or none at all;
Else stupor, headache, fever, rheums, will fall
On him who yields to noontide’s drowsy call.
They believed in light suppers—
Great suppers will the stomach’s peace impair;
Wouldst lightly rest, curtail thine evening fare.
With regard to the interval between meals, the Salernitan rule was, wait until your stomach is surely empty:
Eat not again till thou dost certain feel
Thy stomach freed of all its previous meal.
This mayst thou know from hunger’s teasing call,
Or mouth that waters—surest sign of all.
Pure air and sunlight were favourite tonics at Salerno—
Let air you breathe be sunny, clear, and light,
Free from disease or cess-pool’s fetted blight.
Taking “a hair of the dog that bit you” was, however, a maxim with Salernitans for the cure of potation headaches.
Art sick from vinous surfeiting at night?
Repeat the dose at morn, ’twill set thee right.
The tradition with regard to the difficulty of the digestion of pork, which we are trying to combat in the modern time, had already been established at Salerno. The digestibility of pork could, however, be improved by good wine.
Inferior far to lamb is flesh of swine,
Unqualified by gen’rous draughts of wine;
But add the wine, and lo! you’ll quickly find
In them both food and medicine combined.
Milk for consumptives was a favourite recommendation. The tradition had come down from very old times, and Galen insisted that fresh air and milk and eggs was the best possible treatment for consumption. The Salernitan physicians recommended various kinds of milk, goat’s, camel’s, ass’s, and sheep’s milk as well as cow’s. It is probable, as I pointed out in my “Psychotherapy,” that the mental influence of taking some one of the unusual forms of milk did a good deal to produce a favourable reaction in consumptives, who are so prone to be affected favourably by unusual remedies. The Regimen warned, however, that milk will not be good if it produces headache or if there is fever. Apparently some patients had been seen with the idiosyncrasy for milk, and the tendency to constipation and disturbance after it which have been noted also in the modern time.
Goat’s milk and camel’s, as by all is known,
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