Healthy meat

 The current belief (for most anyway) is that meat isn't really part of a healthy diet. We're told about societies where people routinely live past 100, and how they all eat dried beans, garlic, ancient grains, kale, and olives (or something like that).  In the US beef tallow and full-fat dairy products are experiencing a bit of a resurgence, but the overall consensus is that red meat is not healthy.

The Middle Ages thought about things differently.  For them, red meat was both a luxury and a health food.  Most people, most of the time, ate a basically vegetarian diet, a lot of bread (whole wheat for the most part), whatever vegetables were in season, dried beans and lentils, with the occasional egg or piece of cheese to round it out.  The wealthy added in red meat when they could get it, but other than the annual pork-fest (eat a whole lot of fresh pork at pig roundup time in November, salt and smoke the rest and try to make it stretch out for six months), peasants ate red meat very rarely.

(Those skeptical about the wonders of the whole-grain and kale diet might point out that medieval people rarely made it out of their 50s, but we're not going to talk about that now.) 

Monks ate a vegetarian diet all the time (as did even the wealthy on Fridays and during Lent, though fish was OK then), with one exception.  If they were sick, they needed beef broth! Everyone knew that a sick person needed something strong and nourishing, and beef broth did the trick.  Abbots would look with deep suspicion at monks who "got sick" with remarkable frequency, needing to spend time in the infirmary receiving sustenance.

Beef broth of course comes from boiling beef, with probably a few spices, some honey, and some onions to give it a little extra, if being eaten by someone not entirely ill.  (No potatoes for stew of course, as potatoes are New World, and no carrots, as carrots were not yet domesticated.  Maybe some turnips.). All medieval doctors agreed that boiling meat was better for you than roasting it, even though a lot of people preferred the roast-meat flavor (I certainly do).

An interesting work on nutrition written (and rewritten) during the Middle Ages was  "De observatione ciborum," or as we might translate the title, "Comments on Food."  It was originally written in the sixth century by a physician named Anthimus, in exile from Byzantium (where he was doubtless known as Anthimos). He came both to the court of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic the Great and to the Frankish royal court to serve the Merovingians.

He believed that if you ate the proper foods (including meat), and in the proper way (no gobbling or stuffing oneself), one would not need medicine.  (Sounds sort of New Age-y.  Everything old is new.) He listed several dishes that would (supposedly) help one recover from such ailments as dysentery or a fever.

Given that medicine at the time relied heavily on theories of humours, with blood-letting a big feature, and that the many powders and tinctures doctors might suggest had most definitely not been tested against a placebo, maybe one really would do better with some nice beef broth.

Anthimus is noted today not only for his healthy-living tips but some of his comments on typical behavior of the Franks.  For example, he said that they considered raw bacon a great delicacy.  (Not entirely clear if it was smoked and salted but just not fried, or if it was plain raw pork belly.  I think I won't be a Frank.)

Anthimus's work was copied and expanded in subsequent centuries.  It reappeared at the Carolingian royal court, where again it discussed a particular kind of diet as uniquely Frankish, an aspect of cultural identity.  It continued to be used and quoted at the courts of the powerful through at least the twelfth century.  We are what we eat, and the idea of building healthy living on a proper diet has a very long history.

Abby Riehl of Purdue University is making an extensive study of Anthimus and his work.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available everywhere in paperback

 

 

The Common Cold

One often hears some version of, "If they can send a man to the moon, why can't they cure the common cold?"  Well, for starters there are probably 200 or so different versions of "the" common cold, so you'd need 200 cures.  They are all viruses, which scientists put into several groups, including the Rhinoviruses (the most common), and Coronaviruses, also known as Covid.

Symptoms vary but all include sniffling and aching and maybe running a fever.  One's body does build up immunity, so by the time a person has been around for a while they don't catch nearly as many colds, as they've already had and recovered from a large proportion of them.  Children, as every daycare knows, catch lots of colds, because their immune system is still developing and is meeting colds for the first time.  Influenza is another viral disease, again with a number of different strains, potentially more deadly than a cold and usually not involving sniffles, though it can make a person feel terrible otherwise.

In spite of the name, you won't "catch cold" by going outdoors without a sweater.  But the  cells in your nose that fight off foreign invaders (like viruses) may be less effective when they're chilly, making colds spread more readily, especially when people are mostly indoors during the winter months, breathing each others' air.

(Don't try to treat viral diseases with antibiotics.  Antibiotics are effective against living creatures like bacteria, which viruses are not, and overuse of antibiotics helps antibiotic-resistant bacteria to develop.  This health tip brought to you courtesy of this blog.)

Wait, you say, didn't you just mention Covid a couple paragraphs back?  What's with that?  Yes indeed, I did, because Covid-19 is a Coronovirus, related to though a lot more serious than the "common cold" versions.  It's called "19" because it was first identified in 2019.  (The number has nothing to do with the number of pounds you gained in 2020, staying home, getting no exercise, but filling your time baking sourdough bread and cinnamon rolls.)

But what, you say, does this have to do with the Middle Ages?  You're about to find out.

Some version of "the common cold" has been around for a long time, the sniffles being described by physicians in ancient Egypt.  But there is emerging evidence that one of the Coronovirus versions of the cold first appeared in humans in the thirteenth century.  Like many viruses (including Covid-19), it probably developed first in animals and then made the jump to humans.

It was a killer.  A lot of people got very sick and died.  It was not nearly as bad as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, but it was bad.  Without modern vaccines, people had to rely on their own immune systems and on friends and family keeping them warm and fed.  This is when it became a great act of charity to endow a hospital, to care for the sick and the indigent.

This disease was probably comparable in effect to modern Covid-19, and like Covid-19 it mutated readily, each iteration being somewhat less deadly but somewhat more infectious.  It seems most likely that this medieval form of Covid, now just starting to be studied seriously by historians of medicine, is still with us.  We know we still have a version of Covid that killed a lot of people in Russia in the 1890s, before becoming less deadly.  So it seems Covid-19 is going to be with us permanently, in some form.

By the way, there are a number of "just so stories" about medieval people, some of which involve colds and are clearly untrue.  No medieval priest taught that your soul would escape as you sneezed or coughed, or that the devil would zip into the vacancy your soul left behind.  So stories that people said "Bless you" to encourage your soul to stay put, or that they coughed into a handkerchief to keep the soul from escaping, are just untrue.  People have doubtless said some version of "Bless you" or "Gesundheit" (meaning Good Health) as long as people have sneezed, because sniffles are an illness you hope the person recovers from.  And they coughed into handkerchiefs because, even without knowing about viruses, no one likes a sick person spraying on them.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Leprosy

 Before the Covid pandemic, people would often try to understand the horrors of the fourteenth-century Black Death by saying it must have been like AIDS.  Actually, no.  Even though AIDS has, over the last 35 years or so, killed a lot more people than have been killed (so far) by Covid, it's not particularly like the Black Death (on which see more here).

The actual Black Death (first outbreak in medieval Europe in 1347) was very infectious and transformed society abruptly, with people going from infection to death in a very short time, whereas AIDS is not very infectious, requiring contact of bodily fluids, and, now that the medical profession has worked out treatments, not a death sentence.  (Well, life is a death sentence, but we're not going into that right now.)

Actually the Black Death was more like Covid-19, in its abrupt appearance, rapid spread, and impact on all of society.  But we're not going to have a third of our population dead in a few years, as in the fourteenth century, and there actually are treatments and vaccines, which they did not have then.  (Note:  there were no "Black Death Deniers" in 1347.)

AIDS is more like leprosy, in that it infected a fairly small proportion of the population, and those infected were avoided both as (potential) spreaders of infection and as people considered morally as well as physically compromised.

But let's talk about leprosy itself.  The disease appears in the Bible, called "unclean" in the Old Testament.  In the New Testament Jesus cleansed lepers.  Now it's not entirely clear if all these people in ancient times actually had what we now call leprosy, or if some might have had some other skin disease, but DNA tests have shown the bacterial disease we now call leprosy has been around for thousands of years.  It is also now called Hansen's disease, after the Norwegian doctor Hansen, who in the late nineteenth century first identified the bacterium that causes it.

As a bacterial disease, it can be cured with modern antibiotics, but there was no cure before the mid-twentieth century, and it is still fairly prevalent in some parts of the world, especially India.  The disease attacks the skin and the nerves, so that the infected person may not notice they have wounds, leading to loss of digits especially.  Someone with discolored skin, missing fingers, and maybe shuffling along half blind was frightening.  (Leprosy often infects the eyes.)

Medieval people both feared and pitied lepers.  Although leprosy was (and is) hard to catch, medieval people didn't want to take chances.  Thus lepers were isolated and were supposed to avoid the general population, ringing a bell if they had to go somewhere, to warn people to get out of their way.  The "unclean" of the Bible gave lepers a moral and social stigma, so they were not just frightening but despicable.  The disease has always spread more easily among those living very close together, especially the poor, and encampments of outcasts were "unclean" in the full sense of the word.

But medieval people also pitied lepers and wanted to be Christ-like and, if not actually cleanse them (heal them completely), at least help them.  Just as many hospitals were established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hundreds of leper-houses were set up, essentially sanitariums where lepers would live isolated but properly taken care of.  These were called Lazarus houses, due to the belief that Lazarus, who Jesus brings back from the dead in the Bible, had died of leprosy.  (The Bible doesn't actually say he was a leper, but it's a good story.)

Fun fact:  The abbey of Fontevraud had a leper-house associated with it in the twelfth century, called appropriately St.-Lazare.  It has been remodeled into a luxury hotel.  I bet the Americans who stay there have no idea.  The Paris train station St.-Lazare is located on the site of a medieval leper house.

Leprosy reached the Pacific islands in the nineteenth century.  A leper colony was established on the island of Molokai in the Hawaiian islands, on a lava beach at the bottom of steep cliffs.  Lepers were rowed to nearby, pushed overboard and told to swim to shore.  A Catholic priest, Damien De Veuster, took care of them until he finally caught leprosy himself and died.  He has now been canonized as Saint Damien.  The lepers were there until the later twentieth century, when they were finally cured, though some stayed on at the colony, which had been their home for so long.  The Molokai tourist bureau offered tourists a chance to ride a donkey down the very steep cliff to visit the lepers.  (And they wonder why their island has no high-rise hotels.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2021
For more on medieval hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval soap

"Wash your hands!"  We've been told this since we were little kids, and in a time of pandemic it's especially important.  We assume (rightly) that soap is a crucial ingredient of the process.  Did medieval people have soap?  Yes indeed, though not our kind of soap, in handy wrapped bars or even decorative shapes, smelling delicately of verbena or sandlewood.

The ancient world had not been big on soap, although they knew about it.  Athletes had cleaned up after exercise by smearing themselves with oil and sand, then scraping off the sand with little scrapers, taking the sweat with it.  You can buy "olive oil soap" today, but it's not the same.

Soap is made from mixing rendered fat or oil with a "base" (a base as opposed to an acid, think back to high school chemistry).  Medieval people cooked down (rendered) the fat from meat, which we often throw away, and mixed it with lye made from mixing water with wood ash.  This made a powerful soap, good for dissolving dirt and killing bacteria (although they didn't know about bacteria, they recognized that cleanliness was healthier).  Soap usually didn't come in bars but was soft, more like liquid soap (but no handy pump-top dispensers), and had no delicate fragrance.  Lard-based soap could become more or less solid, though oil-based soap stayed more or less liquid.  This was the normal soap in Europe and the US until the mid-nineteenth century.

(One may note that lard, made from pig fat, is often still recommended for pie crusts, and you can buy it at the grocery store.  But I digress.)

This pre-modern soap would not be described as "gentle on your hands."  Farm families could and did make their own.  In medieval cities, however, soap-making could be a skilled profession, even sometimes a guild, with the different soap-makers promoting soap that came in balls rather than as a thick liquid (making it more convenient), even scented with minced lavender leaves or the like.

Between the difficulty of heating up enough hot water for a bath and not wanting to scrub too much lye-based soap on your delicate parts, medieval people did not bathe as often as the modern model.  They valued cleanliness, but some things are just not easy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on health and hygiene in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available in paperback or as an ebook from Amazon and other on-line booksellers.

Medieval Medicine

There were two main forms of medical practitioners in the Middle Ages, as I've mentioned before, the highly-trained theoretical ones, and the ones with practical experience but little training.  In the first group were those who attended medical school—Salerno and Montpellier both had medical schools by the thirteenth century (and indeed still do).  The second group included barber-surgeons and midwives.  And then there were those somewhere in between.

Much theoretical medicine was based on ancient texts, especially Aristotle.  People who had never looked at an actual dissected body looked at drawings in books and believed them.  One recurrent problem was that the drawings of what was supposed to be the human liver actually portrayed a pig's liver—you can tell the difference because a pig's liver has lots of protruding lobes, which the human liver does not.

Much theoretical medicine was based on the theory of "humours," the four fluids that were supposed to shape not only one's health but one's personality:  blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.  The idea went back to Hippocrates.  We still use the terms "sanguine" (meaning confident) and "phlegmatic" (meaning rather calm and unemotional), personality traits associated with the predominance of one of the humours.  For medical purposes, it was believed that many ills could be cured by rebalancing the humours, which is why bleeding was long practiced as a way to cure people for whom blood had (supposedly) become too dominant.

Theoretical medicine also assumed that nature gave us hints about curative properties.  So caraway seeds were thought to help cure infertility if glued to one's thigh, the idea being that the seed shape would inspire other seeds to take root.  (The church considered reliance on caraway seeds a heresy.  This didn't stop it.)  If medieval doctors had had kidney beans (they didn't, as they are New World), they would have confidently (even sanguinely) said that they were good against kidney disease.

Medically trained doctors also believed that the worse the disease, the more powerful the medicine needed to be.  If one were given a good dose of mercury, it's true that you wouldn't have to worry about dying of the bubonic plague.

Barber-surgeons, on the other hand, had a good practical knowledge of how the human body worked from having cut up a few.  The prohibition against dissecting bodies only started during the Protestant Reformation.  Barber-surgeons had lots of sharp knives, used both for shaving and for surgery, and they would cut up living people too, to get rid of cancer or to deliver a breech baby (one might survive the former, maybe, but not the latter).  They of course did not have anesthesia or what we would call sterile conditions, though they did try at least for the latter.  After all, even though they didn't know about bacteria (no one did until the nineteenth century), they certainly knew about infection.

Cataracts might be treated by applying a hot iron to the eye.  Thanks, I'll stick with modern approaches.

Midwives delivered babies and dealt with other feminine ailments.  They were big fans of caraway seeds.  Women gave birth sitting up (or reclining) rather than lying on their backs with their feet in the air (the twentieth-century method), which gave gravity a chance to help out.  Maternal mortality was higher than in the modern West but lower than in the nineteenth century, when doctors would give women in labor lots of chloroform, having come straight themselves from trying to treat someone with an infectious disease, without washing up.

Then there was the help-the-sick-stay-warm-and-clean approach adopted at hospitals, of which a number were built between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.  They were generally staffed by nuns; British nurses are still called Sister.  Here the ill were fed chicken soup and sprinkled with saint dust and, with luck, their immune systems would kick in and they'd feel better.  (See more here on medieval hospitals.)

People working at the hospitals tried to create good combinations of herbs that might be medicinal.  They would watch what plants animals ate to see what might be safe.  A typical medicine might be dried quince, rose syrup, and ginger, all cooked together in wine.  (Had to be better than mercury.)

The above is a cabinet of medicinal herbs at a medieval hospital.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval health and hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval Health and Hygiene

We have no idea how lucky we are in the twenty-first century to have antibiotics.  Antibiotics were developed for the first time in World War II and have been highly successful in curing bacterial diseases and infections, the things that can kill you if not treated.  Unfortunately, overuse of antibiotics has led to bacteria who are resistant to most of them, so it's possible that the antibiotic era may not even last a century.

In the Middle Ages, without modern medicine, the normal way to treat disease was to keep the sick person warm and clean, feed them chicken soup, and sprinkle them with saint dust.  With luck, their own immune system would kick in and fight off the disease.  This obviously worked better against some diseases than others; it did not work at all against the Black Death at the end of the Middle Ages.

Starting in the twelfth century, the well-to-do felt it a pious duty to endow hospitals, buildings where large rooms would be lined with beds, where the deserving poor would be cared for by nuns (in England, nurses are still addressed as Sister).  Pictured above is the hospital of Beaune in Burgundy, built in the fourteenth century.  The beds along the walls, now with red blankets, had curtains in front for privacy and a hall running behind, hidden again by curtains, where the nurses would come and go.  It is now a museum, but it continued to be the town's municipal hospital until the middle of the twentieth century.

The doctors primarily had a very theoretical idea of medicine, derived from Aristotle, though barber-surgeons had a more practical knowledge of human bodies and could set bones and cut off gangrened limbs (without anesthetics, of course).  It is probably not surprising that most people were worn out in their fifties (see my post on life expectancy).

Still, the Middle Ages did better at medicine than the Renaissance and early modern period, when it was decided that dangerous diseases needed powerful medicines.  Mercury became a popular cure.  It never worked, of course, "proving" how dangerous the disease was.

Medieval people believed in a bath every week, not because they liked being dirty, but because if one has to heat a whole tub of water over a fire, it takes a lot of water and a lot of fuel that were too valuable to waste.  We now take turning the tap for a hot shower for granted, but the weekly bath was the norm in the US well into the twentieth century.

Aristocrats bathed more frequently, even daily if they had access to hot springs, and cleanliness was a mark of elegance.  Everyone did try their best to keep their teeth clean with twigs and their fingernails free of dirt.  (See my post on medieval teeth.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.