Doctor No

My doctor has a cartoon in his exam room; it shows a medical office with a sign reading "Thank you for not discussing your WebMD results."

But what did people do before they had folklore and superstition and "down-home bear-grease rubs to cure the rheumatiz" ? 

Over in England, the Cambridge University Library is displaying some really weird old bizarre medieval medical cures.

They are downright bizarre!

They cover everything from how to treat battle wounds to more common ailments we still deal with today, among them headache, toothache, diarrhea, coughs and aching limbs.

But even if you have one of those afflictions, don't run to these age-old books for the answer.

This chart was to show the doctors where on the body to do bloodletting.

For example, if you have the gout, the prescription called for baking a salted owl and grinding it into powder.

I checked with Walgreens and they are all out of baked salted owl.

They did have alternative medicine in the medieval days. The alternative cure for the gout was stuffing a puppy with snail and sage, roasting it over a fire, and making a salve out of the drippings.

For cataracts, the ℞ was stirring some honey onto the gall bladder of a hare, and then applying that goo to your eye with a feather.

Just for the sake of posterity, the Cambridge Library is digitizing 8,000 of these "cures" found in 180 old manuscripts that date back to the 14th and 15th centuries. 

Besides pulling back the curtain on how primitive medical care used to be, these books also show us how violent life was back then. We tend to think of these old-timers sitting around by campfires, playing their lutes and singing, but their medical people had to be ready to treat combat injuries ranging from broken bones to broken skulls.

Digitization project leader Dr James Freeman describes the old cures as a "bewildering array of ingredients" - animal, vegetable and mineral.

"They show medieval people trying to manage their health with the knowledge that was available to them at the time - just as we do."

And he adds, "They are also a reminder of the pain and precarity of medieval life, before antibiotics, before antiseptics and before pain relief as we would know them all today."

Of course, hundreds of years from now, people will look back and laugh, because we take pills and use ointments that cause side effects such as severe blisters and peeling skin, blisters around the mouth, red, painful palms and feet, shooting pain, numbness and tingling, loss of smell, unusual urges for sex and gambling, and  nightmares and vivid dreams. 

But, I mean, other than that...