In ancient times it was common to use herbs in conjunction with astrology or other forms of divination to treat illness. This was often done by first using gentler internal medicine for a few days or weeks to adjust the perceived imbalance (known as “digesting the peccant humour”), before administering a more drastic treatment in an attempt to jump-start the body back to health (“purging the humour”). In this livestream we’ll take a meander through some of the Renaissance herbal formulas and treatment strategies for different ailments and symptom patterns, looking at them through both a traditional and a contemporary pharmacological lens.
LINKS:
Books:
Richard Saunders’ “The Astrological Judgement and Practice of Physick” (1677). https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Astrological_Judgement_and_Practice.html?id=w2cBzeCZUGUC&redir_esc=y
Richard Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy” https://gutenberg.org/files/10800/10800-h/10800-h.htm
The “angina experiment” is described in “Meaning, medicine and the ‘placebo effect’” by Daniel Moermann https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/meaning-medicine-and-the-placebo-effect/C189929ABE972E5D4C7FE32008EE8838
Plants:
Borage https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-16807-0_46
Chicory https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3860133/
Hellebore https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1934578X231201053
Rhubarb https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7448319/