A Feast for Aesculapius: Historical Diets for Asthma and Sexual Pleasure
By Madeleine Pelner Cosman
Annual Review of Nutrition, Vol. 3 (1983)
Introduction: Medical nutrition’s heyday was the Middle Ages. Even the most nutritionally enlightened modem medical practitioners will not find among colleagues nor patients an understanding of the unity between food and health commonplace in medieval hospitals and banquet halls. Food helps or hinders health. The typical medieval view had the medical corollary that good diet helps the body heal itself. The great 12th century medical theorist and physician Maimonides said that any illness curable by diet alone should not otherwise be treated. Practitioners were thought irresponsible who did not prescribe diet therapy for disease either as treatment of choice or as adjuvant to medication or surgery. Surgical diets were believed necessary to prepare the body before operations, and thereafter to promote wound healing. A medical text or hygiene book that did not enumerate effects of food upon physiognomy was considered defective and untrustworthy. Inappropriate or incorrect medical nutritional care was legal cause for a patient to sue a physician for malpractice.
This assertive interrelationship between nutrition and health is documented magnificently in Western European archives of the 11th through 16th centuries. But the data are not easy to find. The medical culinary texts are written in medieval Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and early English dialects. Few of them have been well translated into modem languages and fewer into English. The medical nutrition scholar must not only be linguistically facile, but intrepid – undaunted by hazards of tracking a vital unique manuscript of a popular book located in a remote place guarded by a malign librarian, obstructionist foreign government, or keyless locked vault. Such exhilarating perils notwithstanding, medieval medical texts are a treasure-trove of food lore, specific recipes, scientific disquisition, practical cooking and preparation techniques, as well as ceremonial service suggestions. Some recommend mood music for enhancing digestion.
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These books, meant neither for sustenance nor ceremony alone, were regi mens for maintaining health or restoring it, and preventing diseases or curing them. An itinerary through this hoard suggests by brief encounter its awesome totality. An excursion through medieval texts discussing cardiovascular or gynecological organ systems might please as much as an inquiry into medical treatises on an anatomical part, such as the head, the neck, the lungs or the extremities; so would a verbal tour of a medical herb garden or zoo, emulating the format of popular 15th century health instruction books, listing plants and animals according to their medicinal qualities and uses. However, to best balance generalization with detail, the typical with the exotic, and the ordinary with the brilliant texts, I suggest our exulting together, first, with the Medieval Food of Love: Sexual Stimulants and Depressants, a subject of universal curiosity, with references drawn from multiple manuscript sources. Then let us consider one particular diet therapy for a specific disease which represents the “state of the art” in medieval medical nutritional treatises: Maimonides’s 12th century discourse, On Asthma.
By Madeleine Pelner Cosman
Annual Review of Nutrition, Vol. 3 (1983)
Introduction: Medical nutrition’s heyday was the Middle Ages. Even the most nutritionally enlightened modem medical practitioners will not find among colleagues nor patients an understanding of the unity between food and health commonplace in medieval hospitals and banquet halls. Food helps or hinders health. The typical medieval view had the medical corollary that good diet helps the body heal itself. The great 12th century medical theorist and physician Maimonides said that any illness curable by diet alone should not otherwise be treated. Practitioners were thought irresponsible who did not prescribe diet therapy for disease either as treatment of choice or as adjuvant to medication or surgery. Surgical diets were believed necessary to prepare the body before operations, and thereafter to promote wound healing. A medical text or hygiene book that did not enumerate effects of food upon physiognomy was considered defective and untrustworthy. Inappropriate or incorrect medical nutritional care was legal cause for a patient to sue a physician for malpractice.
This assertive interrelationship between nutrition and health is documented magnificently in Western European archives of the 11th through 16th centuries. But the data are not easy to find. The medical culinary texts are written in medieval Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and early English dialects. Few of them have been well translated into modem languages and fewer into English. The medical nutrition scholar must not only be linguistically facile, but intrepid – undaunted by hazards of tracking a vital unique manuscript of a popular book located in a remote place guarded by a malign librarian, obstructionist foreign government, or keyless locked vault. Such exhilarating perils notwithstanding, medieval medical texts are a treasure-trove of food lore, specific recipes, scientific disquisition, practical cooking and preparation techniques, as well as ceremonial service suggestions. Some recommend mood music for enhancing digestion.
These books, meant neither for sustenance nor ceremony alone, were regi mens for maintaining health or restoring it, and preventing diseases or curing them. An itinerary through this hoard suggests by brief encounter its awesome totality. An excursion through medieval texts discussing cardiovascular or gynecological organ systems might please as much as an inquiry into medical treatises on an anatomical part, such as the head, the neck, the lungs or the extremities; so would a verbal tour of a medical herb garden or zoo, emulating the format of popular 15th century health instruction books, listing plants and animals according to their medicinal qualities and uses. However, to best balance generalization with detail, the typical with the exotic, and the ordinary with the brilliant texts, I suggest our exulting together, first, with the Medieval Food of Love: Sexual Stimulants and Depressants, a subject of universal curiosity, with references drawn from multiple manuscript sources. Then let us consider one particular diet therapy for a specific disease which represents the “state of the art” in medieval medical nutritional treatises: Maimonides’s 12th century discourse, On Asthma.
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