Looking at a 14th-Century Recipe against Skin Disease

Abstract

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/journals/drm In the vaults of the archive of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, a fairly large collection of Glagolitica is kept, i.e. manuscripts and early printed books in the Glagolitic alphabet. That alphabet was created by St. Cyrill of Thessaloniki in the 9th century and intended to be used by the newly Christianized Slavic peoples. The alphabet was soon replaced in the East by the Cyrillic script and in the West by the Latin script – only in parts of Croatia did the Glagolitic alphabet survive in liturgy, law and literature well into the 19th century. Several Glagolitic monuments with specific medical subjects have also been preserved. We have singled out a clipped 14th-century recipe against skin disease, which poses a challenge for philological and medicohistorical analysis [1]. The recipe is short; it was not written by a member of the learned elite, but most likely by a practitioner who had not even been a trained physician, probably a monk or priest. However ‘unimpressive’ this source may be, it is an illustration of what kinds of medical texts came down to us from the Middle Ages, and what kind of ‘medical practice’ and ‘therapeutic procedure’ they reflect. The 14th-Century Recipe against Skin Disease