Abstract
A considerable number of recipes for anesthetics survive in fifteenth-century English manuscripts.1 In the course of several years’ work on a catalogue of incipits of scientific and medical writings in Old and Middle English, Linda Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz have recorded forty Middle English recipes for surgical anesthetics. Some thirteen of them, found in nine manuscripts (see Appendix B, part B) seem to have had limited circulation; perhaps they were not widely transmitted because they were recognized as deadly. Two that call for morel, either Atropa belladonna or possibly Solanum nigrum, conclude with chilling cautions; the one in Sloane 3160 ends with the statement “þai byn perelis to drink for paraventur thai will greve hym ever after”.2
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Notes
MED s.v. dwale. Dwale also occurs in the plant synonomies surveyed by Tony Hunt, Plant Names of Medieval England (Cambridge 1989), as an English synonym for the following Latin plant names: elleborus (Helleborus foetidus L./viridis L.), faba lupina (Atropa belladonna L.), morella maior (Atropa belladonna L.), and solatium (Solanum nigrum L.).
The MED identifies the etymon of ME dwale (pronounced dwahluh) as OE dwol. The recent fascicle D of the Dictionary of Old English provides a full study of OE dwol, gedwol, dwola, gedwola. The word-field is largely theological, and most of the meanings have to do with error or heresy; there appears to be no physiological use of the word in surviving OE records. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) may provide a more satisfactory explanation of the origin of the medical use of the term as a soporific or stupefacient drink in ME when it gives the derivation as not from OE, but from ON dwol, dvalar, dvali ‘sleep’ or ‘trance’. The ME etymon is probably the ENorse dvala; see H.S. Falk and Alf Torp, Norwegisch-dänisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Oslo 1960), s.v. dvale. We are grateful for the assistance of Antonette Healey and Ian McDougall on this and other etymological questions. Although the word dwale did not survive into the 20th century in English (the most recent citation in the OED is an 1861 botanical usage), the modern South African playwright Athol Fugard has described the protagonist in his play Hello and Goodbye as a man in a dwaal, an Afrikaans word meaning “numbed”, “mentally clouded” (TLS, 26 August–1 September 1988, p. 932).
Treatises of Fistula in ano, Haemorrhoids, and Clysters, ed. D’Arcy Power, EETS o.s. 139 (London 1910), p. 101.
For the chapter that deals with both Lactuca saliva L. and Lactuca scariola L. in De materia medica of Dioscorides, see p. 27 of John Riddle, Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine (Austin 1985). Dioscorides describes both varieties as having some narcotic properties, the wild variety as having some properties similar to opium. Riddle points out, p. 38, that lettuce “contains lactucarium, which consists of lactucin, hyoscyamine, and mannite”.
G.K. Tallmadge, “Some Anesthetics of Antiquity”, Journal of the History of Medicine 1 (1946) 519–20, discusses what he identifies as Lactuca sihestris. There are echoes of Dioscorides in the treatment of lettuce in the influential 12th-century medical compendium associated with Platearius, the Circa instans.
See Das Arzneidrogenbuch Circa instans, ed. Hans Wölfel (Ph.D. diss., Berlin 1939), p. 68. Wölfel identifies the lactuca addressed in the text as Lactuca agrestis or Lactuca saliva (p. 36, n. 554). Work on the Voigts-Kurtz catalogue has identified more than a dozen MSS containing all or part of the Circa instans in ME translation. A study and edition of the ME versions of this text is a desideratum. Lettuce is found in the Ardeme recipe for an anesthetic ointment (Treatises, Power, p. 101).
The Agnus castus owes much to the Circa instans. For an edition of the ME version, see Gösta Brodin, ed., Agnus castus: A Middle English Herbal, Essays and Studies on English Language and Literature 6 (Uppsala 1950); the entry for lettuce or “slepewort”, pp. 172–73, gives a number of medical uses for the plant, including narcotic recipes; however, the entry for wild lettuce, Lactuca sitvatica, describes it as a hot and dry herb with no medical uses.
A Middle English Translation of Macer Floridus, De viribus herbarum, ed. Gösta Frisk, Essays and Studies on English Language and Literature 3 (Uppsala 1949), p. 90.
“Here Men May Se the Verities off Herbes”, ed. Pol Grymonprez, Scripta 3 (Brussels 1981), p. 60. This edition is unsatisfactory
see the review by Henry Hargreaves, Speculum 57 (1982) 684. Many more MSS survive than were consulted by Grymonprez.
Tallmadge, “Some Anesthetics”, pp. 515–20; G.B. Wood and F. Bache, Dispensatory of the United States of America, 11th edn (Philadelphia 1858), pp. 459–63.
See Juhani Norri, Compound Plant-Names in Fifteenth-Century English, Turun yliopiston Englantilaisen filoligian julkaisuja 8 (Turku, Finland 1988), pp. 58–59.
T. Sollman, Manual of Pharmacology and its Application to Therapeutics, 7th edn (Philadelphia 1948), pp. 238–40.
Hemlock, designated by its synonym herb benett in one version of dwale (see Appendix A, variants for 1. 3), is usually identified in medieval usage as Conium maculat urn L. rather than Cicuta maculata (Hunt, Plant Names, p. 81; MED). On the effects of the ingestion of hemlock juice, see E.S. Ellis, Ancient Anodynes (London 1946), pp. 82–83
Walter H. Lewis and Memory P.F. Elvin-Lewis, Medical Botany (New York 1977), pp. 49–50.
F. Peterson, W.S. Haines, and R. W. Webster, eds, Legal Medicine and Toxicology, 2nd edn, vol. II (Philadelphia 1923), pp. 487–90.
The history of the use of the white poppy (Papaver somniferum) and its derivative, opium, has been extensively recounted. See, e.g., Ellis, Ancient Anodynes, pp. 44–52; Tallmadge, “Some Anesthetics”, pp. 516–17; and Sherwin B. Nuland, The Origins of Anesthesia, Classics of Medicine Library (Birmingham 1983), pp. 3–6. A recognition that opium is perhaps the most important ingredient in dwale may be reflected in a medieval synonymy that glosses opium as dweledrink; see Hunt, Plant Names, p. 191.
A. Goth, Medical Pharmacology: Principles and Concepts, 10th edn (St. Louis 1981), p. 344.
Dioscorides recommended the use of Hyoscyamus albus L. or Hyoscyamus aureus L. over Hyoscyamus niger L.; see Riddle, Dioscorides, p. 72; on Galen’s use, see Jean Poulin, L’Anesthésie avant l’emploi du chloroforme et de l’éther (Paris 1931), p. 27. On the history of the use of henbane in soporifics see Ellis, Ancient Anodynes, pp. 79–81, and Tallmadge, “Some Anesthetics”, pp. 517–18.
In the Antidotarium Nicolai, the recipe for the spongia somnifera is no. 104; see Dietlinde Goltz, Mittelalterliche Pharmazie und Medizin Dargestellt an Geschichte und Inhalt des Antidotarium Nicolai mit einem Nachdruck der Druckfassung von 1471 (Stuttgart 1976).
For the texts of eighteen recipes for the soporific sponge from the 9th century to 1847, see Marguerite Baur, “Recherches sur l’histoire de l’anesthésie avant 1846”, Janus 31 (1927) 24–39, 63–90, 124–37, 170–82, 213–25, 264–70, esp. pp. 31–39, 63–66. See also Poulin, L’Anesthésie, p. 53.
Goth, Medical Pharmacology, p. 149. See also Varro E. Tyler, Lynne R. Brady, and James E. Robbers, Pharmacognosy, 9th edn (Philadelphia 1988), pp. 196–97. Baur suggested that the seeds of Hyoscyamus niger are particular rich in scopolamine (“Recherches”, p. 220), but we have not pursued that suggestion.
On henbane and nightshade seeds at Worcester, see John M. Stearne, Archaeology of Medieval England and Wales (London 1964), pp. 264–65. On henbane and hemlock seeds at Waltham Abbey, see Brian Moffat, “S.H.A.R.P. Practice — The Search for Medieval Medical Treatments”, Archaeology Today, May 1987, p. 26. Moffat’s work should be used with caution, however; in the same article he gives the version of dwale printed by Henslow (see Appendix B), but provides erroneous identification of three of the ingredients and suggests that the recipe was administered “through the skin”.
R.D. Connor, The Weights and Measures of England (London 1987), p. 125.
Z.B. Zvi and J. Kaplanski, “Effects of Chronic Heat Exposure on Drug Metabolism in the Rat”, Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology 32 (1980) 369.
R. A. Rink, I. Gray, R.R. Rueckeri, and H.C. Slocum, “The Effect of Hypothermia on Morphine Metabolism in an Isolated Perfused Liver”, Anesthesiology 17 (1956) 377–84.
Karl Sudhoff, “Zu den Schlafschwämmen der Borgognoni”, [Sudhoffs] Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 13 (1921) 127–28
Willem F. Daems, “Spongia somnifera: Philologische und Pharmakologische Probleme”, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Pharmazie 4 (1970) 25–26.
We are grateful to Robert Lewis for sending us a copy of the MED files on thumvange and for his comments on that word and on pouse. For OE uses, see Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (London 1929), s.v. þun-wang.
For the gloss to malas, see T. Wright and R.P. Wülcker, Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies, 2nd edn of vol. I (London, repr. Darmstadt 1968), p. 446, 1.31.
Stanley Rubin, Medieval English Medicine (New York 1974), p. 136.
Other spellings of pouse with n survive. See MED s.v. pous(e. On the 1528 date of Bodl. Rawl. A. 393, see Andrew G. Watson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 435–1600 in Oxford Libraries, 2 vols (Oxford 1984), no. 662.
See above for the Circa ins tans, Antidotarium Nicolai, Poulin, and Baur. See also Marianne Engeser, Der “Liber servitoris” des Abulkasis (936–1013): Übersetzung, Kommentar, und Nachdruck der Textfassung von 1471, Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Pharmazie 37 (Stuttgart 1986).
On the increased use of surgery in late medieval England, see Robert S. Gottfried, Doctors and Medicine in Medieval England 1340–1530 (Princeton 1986). This work should be used with extreme caution, however.
See, e.g., the reviews by Michael McVaugh in Speculum 64 (1989) 168–71
Faye Getz in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61 (1987) 455–61.
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© 1992 Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto
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Voigts, L.E., Hudson, R.P. (1992). A drynke þat men callen dwale to make a man to slepe whyle men kerven him A. In: Campbell, S., Hall, B., Klausner, D. (eds) Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21882-0_3
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