Modern doctors may talk up the benefits of a Mediterranean diet majoring on fruits and vegetables, but their counterparts in the time of Shakespeare were more likely to prescribe lashings of wine, hare skins and dragon’s blood.
An Italian compendium of remedies gathered from the court doctors of Europe for the French king Henry IV in the heyday of alchemy has surfaced at an auction in London.
Assembled in Lyons at the end of the 16th century, the Secreti Eccellentissimi Huomini del Mundo (“Secrets of the Most Excellent Men of the World”) includes nostrums for nose bleeds, cancer, haemorrhoids and swollen testicles. It also contains instructions for treating il mal francese (the French disease), as syphilis was known following its first recognised outbreak among a French army invading Naples in 1494. The unknown author consulted the senior physicians attending Henry IV, his wife and the “mad” Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, an obsessive art collector and natural philosophy enthusiast who dabbled in the occult.
Whether its pages contain anything of value to modern medicine remains unclear. It certainly has a penchant for wine. An entire chapter is devoted to “the virtues of wine and how to use it” for chasing away melancholy, fighting off quartain fever, purging bad blood, curing fistula and ensuring a clear complexion for women.
There is more than a hint of magical thinking. Much like today’s clickbaity online articles that tantalise their readers with “This One Crazy Secret Oncologists Don’t Want To Tell You About”, many of them emphasise their secret origins. One describes how to make “the Oil of the Most Perfect Sun”, a panacea that could apparently cure pains, chills, fevers and wind.
Among the ingredients it calls for are a pound of olive oil, a sprig of rosemary, some yellow wax, myrrh, euphorbium, bitter apples, “black peach” and incense. To stop a nose bleed, the book recommends “refined dragon’s blood”, whose ingredients include gypsum, the skin of a hare and burnt vitriol, and which would at least have given the patient something else to worry about. Dragon’s blood features elsewhere as toothpaste. The 129-page book, which is expected to sell for between £25,000 and £40,000 at Christie’s today, is illustrated by Philibert Plassard, a Lyonais master painter, who doodled pomegranates, apple-eating monkeys and a jester in the margins.
One of the sources it cites is “Jacomo, the French doctor of the King”, who may well have been the alchemist Jacques Gohorry. Others appear to have been made up.
The Secreti Eccellentissimi eventually found its way into the library of William Waldorf Astor, the American-born financier, then on to the Bodleian library in Oxford and through the hands of several private collectors.
Kay Sutton, director of medieval manuscripts at Christie’s, said: “There’s potential for a great deal of research here. But it’s also a manuscript of extremely interesting provenance.”
The old Mediterranean diet
Remedy for chasing worms out of the ear
Take sap of celandine, and a little of its essence. Put it where the worms are. You will see them wriggle out.
Stopping a nosebleed
Take pyrite; gypsum; hare’s skin; and burnt vitriol (sulphuric acid). Mix together, then snort the powder.
Remedy for pains of the limb or penis
Take well-pounded sal ammoniac, salgemma (rock salt), sugar alum, potassium alum, myrrh and incense. Combine these into a fine powder and mix with rosewater and a solution of plantains. Leave to stand for two nights and then strain into a bottle.
Dining and Cooking