Scale is sometimes hard to understand. When someone reaches one hundred years of age we often shakes our heads in disbelief, hoping the same for ourselves while trying to mine their secrets. Compare a hundred years against the age of the earth and—you’ve likely heard the one about human existence being a mere second if all of history were stretched to a year.
Before, germ theory and vaccines medicine moved slowly. No serious physician would diagnose based on humors today, though that does not mean Hippocrates was completely misguided. His therapy allowed nature to run its course through the patient’s body, which is terrible advice when considering cancer but effectively all one can do when dealing with colds and flus. Sometimes, as we know, the remedy proves to be worse than the sickness. Humoral doctors also tailored specific treatments to each patient, an emerging practice that’s slowly replacing the one-size-fits-all prescription.
So while romanticizing a pre-vaccine world is for fringe quackery and conspiracy theorists, that does not mean old wisdom is always ineffective. That’s why ancientbiotics, an international group of chemists, microbiologists, parasitologists, data scientists, mathematicians, and other professionals, are scouring ancient texts in search of medicines that stand up to modern scrutiny.
As you are probably aware antibiotics are no longer working so well. Overuse in our bodies (as well as in farm feed) has created super microbial strains that resist our resistance. Seven hundred thousand people die every year from drug-resistant infections. As the University of Pennsylvania’s Erin Connelly writes, if new treatments are not developed such infections will kill ten million people annually by 2050.
And so Connelly and others are creating a database of “medieval medical recipes” in hopes of discovering what wisdom folk cultures really accumulated. I immediately thought of quinine,…
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