Thomas Wort’s Fifteenth-Century Book of Remedies
A record in The Hawthorn Archive, preserving folklore with its place, type and source context attached.
Cambridge University Library preserves a manuscript associated with Thomas Wort, a fifteenth-century informal healer. It contains more than two hundred Middle English medical recipes.
The manuscript is evidence that practical medical knowledge did not flow only through university-trained physicians. Informal practitioners could preserve and use substantial bodies of written remedy knowledge. Such evidence should not, however, be used to label every unlicensed healer a magical practitioner.
Source trail: Cambridge University Library Special Collections, “Thomas Wort, leech, and his book of remedies”.
Related Journal record: Wise Women and Cunning Men.