Diana Goodier about to deliver her talk to the Friends of Harthill and Calderstones Park group
Having been fascinated by Diana, her knowledge of Saxon and Viking herbalism and medicine, her artefacts and the tales she told at the Calderstones Nature Reserve Open Day in June, I couldn’t miss this presentation – and it was excellent.
Diana Goodier at Calderstones Park Nature Reserve Open Day
Yet again, Diana had a range of items on a table in front of her, but she barely scratched the surface, and her talk flew by very quickly, packed with amazing and sometimes eye-wateringly gruesome facts.
Items on Diana’s table at the CPNR OD
Items in Diana’s basket at the CPNR OD
She first explained why she was wearing the dress of a pagan Viking lady: she needed a role in her re-enactment group, and decided that her career as a university librarian specialising in medicine gave her the perfect background to adopt the role of doctor/herbalist. Research led her to three extant Anglo-Saxon medical textbooks:
- The Old English Herbarium, a translation of old Latin and Greek.
- Bald’s Leechbook – as she noted, ‘leech’ is from ‘læca’, the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘doctor’, and only later became associated with leeches and bloodletting. Its ideas are drawn from people of Greek, Roman, Germanic and even Anglo-Saxon origin, and it is organised in a logical sequence from head to feet and external to internal. More information and photographs of the text can be found on the British Library’s website: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/balds-leechbook, and it is fascinating to note that this text was written around 925-950 – over 1,000 years ago.
- The Lacnunga, a collection of Anglo-Saxon remedies in notebook form, written mainly in Old English and Latin. The work contains a mixture of pagan and Christian ideas.
There is no evidence of women doctors in these texts, so Diana turned to the Vikings and found references to sending for a female doctor in parts of the Icelandic sagas. (I found it strange that the domestic medical texts of the Anglo-Saxons did not refer to women healers whereas the battlefield medical texts of the Vikings did, and it is something that I would like to know more about.)
Diana then told us about some of the ailments and their ‘cures’; for example, the ‘soup wound’, which refers to the triaging of warriors wounded in the stomach (feed them soup laden with garlic and leeks, leave them a while, then go back and sniff the wound, and if you can smell the soup, then their stomach has been pierced and they will die).
We also learned that, if you wounded someone, you had to pay for their care – for the ointment and bandages used to treat them, and for the doctor’s fee. So perhaps the 10th century isn’t as far away as it seems!
Diana explained how many of the cures were based on a great deal of observation and sense – without the technical accoutrements we have today. For example, for night blindness, which is caused by a Vitamin A deficiency, they recommended killing a buck, eating the liver and drinking the juice, and liver, as we know, contains Vitamin A.
Finally, she introduced Egil Skallagrímsson, murderer, mercenary and poet, who worked for Athelstan. Egil’s Saga was written around 990, and contains a list of his ailments, which a modern researcher has identified as indicating that he had Paget’s disease. His was a fascinating story and I made a note to delve deeper into it (https://www.norwegianamerican.com/egil-skallagrimsson/).
A fascinating hour, which flew by – unlike the sagas, which can go on a bit!