Human societies have built up a huge repertoire of ways to fight disease, many of them involving herbal remedies. But when these remedies were tested by scientific doctors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they proved to have no or very little benefit.
But bacteria evolve very rapidly, especially when it comes to resistance to antibiotics. Which raises the question: did those old remedies once work, before bacteria evolved resistance to them? Some studies have suggested that this might be true:
In 2015, Harrison and a team of microbiologists and historians brewed a remedy from the Leechbook, called Bald’s eyesalve, in the lab. They mixed garlic, onion, bovine bile and wine in a brass vessel, then allowed it to stand for nine days. In laboratory tests, Bald’s eyesalve displayed surprisingly effective antimicrobial activity against both Staphylococcus aureus and its drug-resistant form, MRSA.
These researcher also say that it may be harder for bacteria to evolve resistance to those old herbal mixtures than to moder, single-compound drugs.
Learning and thinking about this completely changed my attitude toward ancient and medieval herbal medicine. I used to think about this entirely in psychological terms, wondering why people devoted so much effort to useless remedies, but not I wonder which compounds had real value, and when, and how much ancient and medieval people understood about their effects.
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