Mercury and mouse-ear: exhibition lifts the lid on medieval medicine
The Guardian
|March 28, 2025
Medieval treatments may make you question the sanity of the doctors of the day, but a new exhibition will take visitors inside their minds and reveal the methods behind what now seems like madness.
Curious Cures, opening tomorrow at Cambridge University Library, is the culmination of a project to digitise and catalogue more than 180 medical manuscripts, mostly from the 14th and 15th centuries. The collection contains everything from alchemical texts to compendiums of cures and guides to healthy living.
On display are wince-inducing surgical diagrams, illustrations such as Zodiac Man, which depicts body parts associated with star signs, and treatment recipes, together with their translations.
While people from the middle ages faced many of the same ailments experienced by patients today, it is clear they tackled them rather differently.
One of the manuscripts, dating from the 15th century, suggests women can cure their infertility by burning weasel testicles in a pot with mouse-ear – a wildflower – to create pessaries that are placed in the cervix for three days.
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