London (CNN)It might sound like a really old wives' tale, but a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon potion for eye infections may hold the key to wiping out the modern-day superbug MRSA, according to new research.
The 10th-century "eyesalve" remedy was discovered at the British Library in a leather-bound volume of Bald's Leechbook, widely considered to be one of the earliest known medical textbooks.
Christina Lee, an expert on Anglo-Saxon society from the School of English at the University of Nottingham, translated the ancient manuscript despite some ambiguities in the text.
"And so we looked at a recipe that is fairly straightforward. It's also a recipe where we are told it's the 'best of leechdoms' -- how could you not test that? So we were curious."
Lee enlisted the help of the university's microbiologists to see if the remedy actually worked. The scientists weren't holding out much hope that it would work -- but they were astonished by the lab results.
"What we found was very interesting -- we found that Bald's eyesalve is incredibly potent as an anti-Staphylococcal antibiotic in this context," Harrison said.
"We were going from a mature, established population of a few billion cells, all stuck together in this highly protected biofilm coat, to really just a few thousand cells left alive. This is a massive, massive killing ability."
"The Middle Ages are often seen as the 'Dark Ages' -- we use the term 'medieval' these days ... as pejorative -- and I just wanted to do something that explains to me how people in the Middle Ages looked at science," she said.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/31/health/anglo-saxon-potion-mrsa/index.html
The 10th-century "eyesalve" remedy was discovered at the British Library in a leather-bound volume of Bald's Leechbook, widely considered to be one of the earliest known medical textbooks.
Christina Lee, an expert on Anglo-Saxon society from the School of English at the University of Nottingham, translated the ancient manuscript despite some ambiguities in the text.
"And so we looked at a recipe that is fairly straightforward. It's also a recipe where we are told it's the 'best of leechdoms' -- how could you not test that? So we were curious."
Lee enlisted the help of the university's microbiologists to see if the remedy actually worked. The scientists weren't holding out much hope that it would work -- but they were astonished by the lab results.
"What we found was very interesting -- we found that Bald's eyesalve is incredibly potent as an anti-Staphylococcal antibiotic in this context," Harrison said.
"We were going from a mature, established population of a few billion cells, all stuck together in this highly protected biofilm coat, to really just a few thousand cells left alive. This is a massive, massive killing ability."
"The Middle Ages are often seen as the 'Dark Ages' -- we use the term 'medieval' these days ... as pejorative -- and I just wanted to do something that explains to me how people in the Middle Ages looked at science," she said.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/31/health/anglo-saxon-potion-mrsa/index.html
