Bald's Leechbook

Bald's Leechbook (also known as Medicinale Anglicum) is an Old English medical text probably compiled in the ninth-century, possibly under the influence of Alfred the Great's educational reforms.

It takes its name from a Latin verse colophon at the end of the second book which begins Bald habet hunc librum Cild quem conscribere iussit, meaning "Bald owns this book which he ordered Cild to compile."

The text survives in only one manuscript, held in London at the British Library. The manuscript contains one further medical text, called Leechbook III, which is also included in this entry.

Both books are organised in a head-to-foot order, but the first book deals with external maladies, the second with internal disorders. Cameron notes that "This separation of external and internal diseases may be unique in medieval medical texts".

Cameron notes that "in Bald's Leechbook is the only plastic surgery mentioned in Anglo-Saxon records". The recipe in particular prescribes surgery for a Cleft lip and palate, Leechbook i, chapter 13 (pr Cockayne p 56).

Cameron also notes that of the Old English Medical compilations "Leechbook iii reflects most closely the medical practice of the Anglo-Saxons while they were still relatively free of Mediterranean influences," in contrast to Bald's Leechbook which "shows a conscious effort to transfer to Anglo-Saxon practice what one physician considered most useful in native and Mediterranean medicine," and the Lacnunga, which is "a sort of common place book with no other apparent aim than to record whatever items of medical interest came to the scribe's attention".

Rev. Oswald Cockayne, editor and translator of an 1865 edition of the Leechbook, made note in his introduction of what he termed 'a Norse element' in the text, and gave, as example, words such torbegate, rudniolin, ons worm and Fornets palm.

One cure for headache was to bind a stalk of crosswort to the head with a red kerchief. Chilblains were treated with a mix of eggs, wine, and fennel root. Agrimony was cited as a cure for male impotence - when boiled in milk, it could excite a man who was "insufficiently virile;" when boiled in Welsh beer it would have the opposite effect. The remedy for shingles comprised a potion using the bark of 15 trees: aspen, apple, maple, elder, willow, sallow, myrtle, wych-elm, oak, blackthorn, birch, olive, dogwood, ash, and quickbeam.

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