17th-century Witch Bottle

Posted by Miss Cellania in Everything Else on June 6, 2009 at 10:37 am

A bottle has been unearthed in Greenwich, England that contains urine and objects believed to have been put there to combat witchcraft. It was completely corked, so the contents were available for analysis, unlike other bottles found from the period.

An Old Bailey court record from 1682 documents that a husband, believing his wife to be afflicted by witchcraft, was advised by a Spitalfields apothecary to “take a quart of your Wive’s urine, the paring of her Nails, some of her Hair, and such like, and boyl them well in a Pipkin.”

The excavated bottle appears to have been made according to those, or similar, instructions.

CT scans and chemical analysis, along with gas chromatography conducted by Richard Cole of the Leicester Royal Infirmary, reveal the contents of the bottle to include human urine, brimstone, 12 iron nails, eight brass pins, hair, possible navel fluff, a piece of heart-shaped leather pierced by a bent nail, and 10 fingernail clippings.

So far, they’ve found the urine was from someone who smoked, and the fingernails were in good shape, indicating a person of high status. Link -via Unique Daily

(image credit: Mike Pitts/British Archaeology)

 
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10 Excruciating Medical Treatments from the Middle Ages

Posted by Miss Cellania in Medicine on March 30, 2009 at 9:29 am

Just reading this article can be painful. It has descriptions of the horrible treatments that were often the only thing available for what ailed you in the Middle Ages.

It was not a pleasant time to be a patient, but if you valued your life, there was no choice. To relieve the pain, you submitted to more pain, and with any luck, you might get better. Surgeons in the early part of the Middle Ages were often monks because they had access to the best medical literature – often written by Arab scholars. But in 1215, the Pope said monks had to stop practicing surgery, so they instructed peasants to perform various forms of surgery. Farmers, who had little experience other than castrating animals, came into demand to perform anything from removing painful tooth abscesses to performing eye cataract surgery.

Some of the medieval medical graphics may be NSFW. Link -via Gorilla Mask

 
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