Old way to cure gout: first grind your owl...

CURIOUS medieval “cures” – including a gout treatment that involved grinding a baked owl into a powder – are being shared online by Cambridge University Library.

- Mark Reynolds

Another gruesome therapy told gout sufferers to stuff a puppy with snails then roast it and use the rendered fat to make an ointment.

More than 180 manuscripts will be digitised and catalogued in the Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries project.

The documents, with around 8,000 unedited medical methods, date mostly from the 14th or 15th centuries but one is around 1,000 years old. The texts come from the collections of the University Library, Fitzwilliam Museum and a dozen Cambridge colleges.