@UniofNottingham Bald's Leechbook recipe kills MRSA - Dark Ages shines Medieval Light on Modern Anti-biotics

“The Middle Ages are often seen as the 'Dark Ages' -- we use the term 'medieval' these days ... as pejorative -- and I just wanted to do something that explains to me how people in the Middle Ages looked at science”

Christina Lee of the University of Nottingham, who translated the eyesalve recipe in the Bald's Leechbook under the AncientBiotics Project

This story about a 1000 year old eye-salve recipe that can attack and kill drug-resistant MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) bacterium as reported in the article “Thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon potion kills MRSA superbug”, published  March 31, 2015 By Nick Thompson and Laura Smith-Spark, CNN has me thoroughly intrigued.

Dr. Christina Lee of the University of Nottingham translated the recipe for an eye-salve to cure an eye-stye, a condition caused by an ingrown hair follicle from your eyelashes. Using a leather bound version of a 1000 year old Bald's Leechbook as part of the AncientBiotics Project, Dr. Christian began the painful and possibly quite moldy work of translating the remedy.

The leechbook is a medical textbook from the Dark Ages, a historical periodization term used to describe the Middle Ages. The Dark Ages was a very troubled time in the 10^th and 11^th centuries.

The term “Dark Age” was originally coined by Caesar Baronius in 1602 in the Latin saeculum obscurum. An expert in Anglo-Saxon English, customs and a member of the School of English at the University of Nottingham, she managed to do a decent enough job to make the potion work.

Despite that time period, however, the medical doctors of the time seemed to follow a lot of scientific principles, such as precise measurements, hypothesis, detailed observations and experimentation to test out hypothesis.

So how did they make this recipe?

University of Nottingham recreates Bald's Leechbook recipe and kill MRSA - Dark Ages shines a Light on Modern Anti-biotics

Realizing what she had, Dr. Christina Lee then enlisted the help of University of Nottingham microbiologist Dr. Freya Harrison and Associate Professor of sociomicrobiology, Dr. Steve Diggle, whose team followed the recipe's precise instructions and measurements and recreated the recipe from the following ingredients:

1.      Two species of Allium (garlic and onion or leek)

2.      Wine

3.      Oxgall (bile from a cow's stomach)

According to the article “1,000-year-old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA”, published 30 March 2015, BBC News, the recipe is as follows:

1.      Equal amounts of garlic and another allium (onion or leek), finely chopped and crushed in a mortar for two minutes.

2.      Add 25ml (0.87 fl oz) of English wine - taken from a historic vineyard near Glastonbury.

3.      Dissolve bovine salts in distilled water, add and then keep chilled for nine days at 4C

The mixture was then brewed in a brass vessel, with the wine being obtained from a ninth century Vineyard. It was then left to stand for nine (9) days as per the recipe and then strained though a cloth.

They did this so as to make sure they got it spot on, to quote University of Nottingham microbiologist Freya Harrison: “We recreated the recipe as faithfully as we could. The Bald gives very precise instructions for the ratio of different ingredients and for the way they should be combined before use, so we tried to follow that as closely as possible”.

Then here's where it gets weird…..it actually worked!

Bard's Eye-salve kills MRSA - Medieval Remedies aimed at curbing bacterial infections may work

The team, out of the blue, decided to test it on antibiotic-resistant MRSA and discovered it killed 90% of those little critters, to quote microbiologist Dr. Freya Harrison: “What we found was very interesting -- we found that Bald's eye-salve is incredibly potent as an anti-Staphylococcal antibiotic in this context. We were going from a mature, established population of a few billion cells, all stuck together in this highly protected biofilm coat, to really just a few thousand cells left alive. This is a massive, massive killing ability”.

MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is a common infection in hospitals that’s caused by a staph bacterium.

Its notoriety is mainly due to its drug-resistant traits and its manifestation on patients as a subcutaneous abscess or really ugly sores. The fact that it works so well, is what surprised the University of Nottingham team.

Dr. Christina Lee didn't seem so surprised, quote: “Medieval leech books and herbaria contain many remedies designed to treat what are clearly bacterial infections, weeping wounds/sores, eye and throat infections, skin conditions such as erysipelas, leprosy and chest infections”.

Dr Kendra Rumbaugh, of Texas Tech University in the US of as, replicated the mixture and used it in “in vivo” wound biopsies from mice. To their surprise, it killed up to 90% of MRSA bacteria.

I won't go much further than this, as the scientists are still trying to figure out why this eyesalve even kills MRSA and what exactly in the mixture does this killing. It might be some new compound created by the processes that killed the bacterium or it may have been a combination of things.

Garlic is in the mixture and is known to be an effective treatment for high blood pressure and sufferers of asthma like myself. But the combination of the garlic with other ingredients seems to be the hidden mystery as to how this mixture has such a potent killing ability against normally drug-resistant MRSA.

If it works so well, what other miracle cures lies buried in old Middle Age manuscripts that may hold the key to fighting modern day infections as argued in the article “A medieval remedy for MRSA is just the start of it. Powdered poo, anyone?”, published Monday 6 April 2015 by Richard Sugg, The UK Guardian?

Thought to ponder on ye olde Leechbooks of Medicine.