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Could medieval medicine help the fight against antimicrobial resistance?
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Harrison, Freya and Connelly, Erin (2019) Could medieval medicine help the fight against antimicrobial resistance? In: Jones, Chris and Kostick, Conor and Oschema, Klaus, (eds.) Making the Medieval Relevant: How Medieval Studies Contribute to Improving our Understanding of the Present. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 113-134. ISBN 9783110546316
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WRAP-could-medieval-medicine-help-fight-against-antimicrobial-resistance-Harrison-2019.pdf - Published Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 4.0. Download (336Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110546316-005
Abstract
The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, combined with a severely stalled discovery pipeline for new antibiotics being developed, has the potential to undo the advances in infection control achieved in the last century. One way around this impasse might be to re-explore the medicinal practices of the medieval world. Why? This is because although the medieval world was ignorant of so much of modern theory, it seems that centuries of practice by medieval doctors could have produced some treatments for infections that were effective. These could contain antimicrobial compounds suitable for development into antibiotics. Our interdisciplinary team, initially based at the University of Nottingham, tested an eyesalve described in the tenth century Anglo-Saxon ‘Bald’s Leechbook’ with startling results. By following the recipe as closely as possible, we created a cocktail that can kill one of the most common causes of eye infections, the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. More significantly, Bald’s eyesalve can kill a range of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This chapter details our team’s initial findings and places them in the context of an interdisciplinary analysis of how medieval doctors used the materia medica available to them. We present novel results confirming the reliability of Bald’s eyesalve as an anti-Staphylococcal agent. Further, we demonstrate the potential of ‘big data’ approaches to turn medical texts into predictive databases for selecting natural materials for antibiotic testing. Finally, we present our work as an example of how interdisciplinary dialogue can significantly advance scholarship.
| Item Type: | Book Item | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Subjects: | Q Science > Q Science (General) R Medicine > R Medicine (General) R Medicine > RM Therapeutics. Pharmacology |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Science > Life Sciences (2010- ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Medicine, Medieval, Anti-infective agents, Interdisciplinary research, Communicable diseases -- History | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Publisher: | De Gruyter | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Place of Publication: | Berlin, Boston | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ISBN: | 9783110546316 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Book Title: | Making the Medieval Relevant: How Medieval Studies Contribute to Improving our Understanding of the Present | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Editor: | Jones, Chris and Kostick, Conor and Oschema, Klaus | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Official Date: | 2019 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Page Range: | pp. 113-134 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1515/9783110546316-005 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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