Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/413

 Reviews. 363

comparatively few do, that to approach the study of books of this early period merely for the purpose of discovering " quaint " things or of providing amusement for gaping ignoramuses is to throw away one's labour, and that the only way in which real value can be obtained is to try and project oneself into the minds of the writers of the time and discover their attitude towards the subject with which they were concerned and its consonance with the literature, science and knowledge of the period.

The first work dealt with, The Leech Book of Bald, is the most important surviving memorial of Anglo-Saxon medicine. The MS. in existence appears to have been written shortly after the death of Alfred, but the book itself must have been composed at an earlier date. It was the text-book of a man in medical practice, and as he alludes to two confreres, Dun and Oxa, it is clear that a Faculty of some kind was then in existence. As usually happens in these early books, treatment looms larger than diagnosis, and principles of any kind are conspicuous by their absence. Some of the diseases are spoken of under rather striking names \ " half head's ache " is an excellent Englishing of our hemicrania, the migraine of the French, and " circle-adle " is a good name for our herpes zoster or shingles. " Poccas " or "poc-adle" seems to be our modern small-pox, and there are many other terms over which one cannot linger. The actual accounts of diseases are — like our own — mixtures of tradition and observation, but unlike our own, the tradition is not corrected by observation, but set down beside it without any critical treatment. Take the case of pleurisy, fully given at p. 50. About half this description agrees more or less with that given by Aretsus, and a good many points in it are common to all the classical writers, from Hippocrates downwards. But there are several points not discoverable in any ancient writer which must have been evolved by Bald himself or by some of his island brethren, so that on the whole we get a mixture of ancient traditions mingled with some direct observation. Not much of the latter; for the absence of any proof of clinical observation is a marked feature in a book in which the feeling of the pulse is not once alluded to. Added to what we may call the science of the day is a superstitious element, consisting of charms and formularies. Dr. Payne traces many of these to late Greek and Latin medicine,