So within my medieval reenactment group (Historia Normannis) a friend and I have been exploring the 12th century medicine, with the intention of creating our own reconstructions to test at shows. Despite knowing that the majority of these herbal remedies are homeopathic, I am very curious to see if they have any healing capacity. We are using resources put together by the society, to form a medieval herb garden. From this we plan to make oils and balms and ointments to treat various ailments from bruising to pain relief to more serious conditions. (Don’t worry we will be making sure everything is completely safe first!)
I thought since I started this blog to explore the history of medicine, that this would be a perfect place to track and record our experiments and findings.
The journey so far: after an exciting trip to the local garden centre and a lot of repotting… our herb garden is off to a good start! We have a whole bunch of plants, which I will go into more detail about in a futher post. We have also been and bought a lot of the more obscure herbs from a herbalist in the city. Again these purchases will be explained in the future.
The next steps are to start some oil infusions, particularly of rosmary, clove, lavender and a few others. These will take a few weeks to infuse before we can make balms from them. In the meantime we are focusing on learning the herbs by sight and smell, as labels were not historically authentic.
Catherine's Science Blog 