A Leechbook: or Collection of Medical Recipes of The Fifteenth Century

Abstract

THE Medical Society of London was founded in 1773 and has possessed since its earliest ‘jdaysMBi Noc 136, which Mr. Warren Dawson has now transcribed and rendered into modern English, the original text and the twentieth icentury version dbeing “convenimitly printed on Opposite-pages throughout the book The medieval compiler of this collection of recipes provides a rich supply of common names of herbs on which the editor very wisely, says that even in the Middle Ages the identification of plants and minerals in medical manuscripts must have been a matter of the greatest complexity, ikid that the glossaries I and nomeniilators then drawn up giving the synonomy of herbs “often increase rather than diminish our difficulties”. Point is given to this comment by the recent efforts of correspondents of the Times and the British Medical Journal to give botanical precision to ‘cow parsley’ and to ‘ground ivy’ respectively.

A Leechbook: or Collection of Medical Recipes of The Fifteenth Century.

The Text of MS. No. 136 of the Medical Society bf London, together with Transcript into Modern Spelling, Transcribed and edited with an Introduction, Notes and Appendix By Warren R. Dawson (Published for the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom under the Terms of the Dr. Richards Trust.) Pp. iv + 344 (Loiadon: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. 1934.) 20s. net.