The Medieval Antiseptic

At the beginning of last year, I read a statement that honey was spread on wounds in the Middle Ages. That seemed an odd thing to do and there was no source given in the notes of the book. It didn’t even say what putting honey on wounds was supposed to achieve or whether that was a sensible thing to do.

I searched through some of my more likely books, but could find nothing about it at all. I have three books about medicine in the medieval and renaissance periods and none of them mentions honey in their index.

More recently I was reading the magazine produced by the gin club I’m in and there was an article about bees. Apparently honey is a good ingredient for some cocktails, but that wasn’t what I found interesting. Towards the end of the article it said that honey “naturally produces the antibacterial substance hydrogen peroxide in small amounts. In nature this protects the honey stores from bacteria…”. So there it was: an antiseptic that was used in the Middle Ages.

A few weeks after that, I was listening to a podcast I follow and the interviewee was talking about the stockpiling of honey during times of war in the Middle Ages, the inference being that it was taken on campaign to be used on wounded soldiers. She also spoke about a reference to honey being used by a doctor on a very important patient – Prince Henry, soon to be Henry V.

When he was Prince of Wales, Henry fought in the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. An arrow struck him in the face, penetrating six inches, and he was taken to Kenilworth Castle where John Bradmore, a court physician who was in prison under suspicion of counterfeiting coins, worked out a method for extracting it. Not surprisingly, other physicians were wary of removing the arrow, since the chances of killing the young prince were high. Given that counterfeiting was punished severely, Bradmore must have thought he had little to lose. He also had a plan.

I won’t go into the details of the plan and how it worked out; you might be eating. Suffice it to say that the arrow was removed and Henry survived. What matters is that Bradmore wrote a treatise about what he had done called Philomena, in which he recorded that he poured honey into the wound.

It has taken over eighteen months, and a variety of unexpected sources, but I now feel that I can refer to honey being used on wounds in my novels rather than to some unnamed ointment.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon