Medical Recipes, from Bald's 'Leech-book'

This manuscript contains fragments of several separate books. This page comes from a chapter of a 'laeceboc', that is, a leech-book ('leech' is an old-fashioned word for a physician). The leech-book contained mainly charms, some of them poetic, and recipes for treating ailments afflicting humans and livestock, such as lice, boils, stomach-ache. The book's sources include ancient medical texts passed on from Roman times, some via Arabian sources--Arab traders apparently were key suppliers of ingredients--as well as native herbal and magical traditions. The style of its handwriting suggests that it could have been written either at York or Worcester, but it was at Worcester later in the middle ages.