Healing honey and haemorrhoid leeches

England cricketer Moeen Ali - “the beard that’s feared” - has credited an NHS worker with helping heal an injured finger after she sent him a ‘wonder’ gel made from honey. It came as a surprise to many - including the spin bowler himself - that the golden stuff can be used to help heal wounds, but the practice dates back earlier than even the ancient Egyptians. Sophie Goggins is senior curator of biomedical science at National Museums Scotland…

Sophie - We don't know exactly the first time honey was used medicinally. But we have some really early recorded examples in Sumerian clay tablets from around 6,200 BC and also examples in Egyptian papyrus about using honey to treat wounds and also sore throat. But historic use of honey has kind of been seen across the entire globe. From Greece to the Romans, to the Mayans, to Babylon.

Chris - Do we know what they were doing with it and were all those practices roughly the same?

Sophie - They may not have known why exactly honey was helping, but they certainly knew that honey was helping to heal wounds. So we now have the benefit of knowing that honey is an anti-inflammatory and antibacterial and also has the great benefit of it provides a damp or, I know people hate this word, but moist environment for wounds to heal, which actually helps them speed up healing and less likely to scar, which are both things that are recorded of honey being used to treat wounds.

Chris - So they would've smeared it on when they had some kind of laceration or some kind of penetrating injury. Honey would've just gone on, almost out of the jar.

Sophie - Yes. I think out of what I imagine were quite beautiful jars and what maybe we call today a poultice also in something that people might remember or recognize also being used in hot water with citrus to help with a sore throat.

Chris - Did they document why they thought it might be working or were they just comfortable with the fact that this appears to work, we'll just use it.

Sophie - Writing about medicine of that time is very much more like an instruction manual. They're not giving us a lot of insight into why they thought things, but what they would use to treat certain diseases. I should also say some from that time are a little bit less helpful than our honey example.

Chris - I mentioned leeches in the introduction because that's the other one that's got a little bit of ick factor, but also is a great story in the telling and it really works. Plastic surgeons use leeches to get the blood out of bits of tissue that otherwise would suffer from what we call venous congestion. So we know that this is the real deal that also has a rich history, doesn't it?

Sophie - Yeah. So there's examples of leeches depicted in tombs from ancient Egypt around 1400 BC but a particular record I like is a medicinal record from 50 AD by Pliny the Elder, which recommended leeches to be used for treating haemorrhoids, which I imagine would work but would be quite an experience.

Chris - Quite uncomfortable, I should think. . Wow. I'm not really sure what to ask off the back of that. But again, did they use them consistently? Because we know that it works in the modern era when we are putting bits of the body back together because the problem isn't getting blood into tissue, it's that the blood gets in and can't get out. So surgeons tend to light leeches because they'll draw the waste blood away from tissue, which means more fresh blood goes in. Did our ancient historical ancestors know about this sort of practice or were they just doing it because it seemed again, a bit magical and occasionally someone got better so they thought, well let's do this.

Sophie - Well, Galen of the four humours fame was a big fan of leeches in order to balance the humours so people remove blood from the body. But I would say they hit peak popularity, if you can, in around the 19th century for the same type of thing, just to remove blood

Chris - But not haemorrhoids that time?

Sophie - You'd hope not. .

Chris - Are there any other examples of things a bit like leeches from history where you can find that there's actually quite a long history of its use, but it turns out to be quite a valid treatment and is this still in use today?

Sophie - Yeah, so one that springs to mind is cloves and clove oil, which have been used in dentistry for hundreds of years and before that in traditional medicine. So clove oil's kind of cool and contains a chemical called eugenol, which might help decrease pain and also fight infection. So it's why you often are told to rub clove oil on a wound in your mouth, but that chemical is actually used in dental preparations for stealing root canals and also for pain control.

Chris - Amazing. We know that people are increasingly getting interested in folklore remedies and, and they're going and talking to indigenous people about indigenous solutions to various diseases, and that's how a number of new medicines have been 'discovered', in inverted commas. Are any projects underway to datamine historical text to look for lost treatments or lost antidotes to various things so that we can discover things in writing rather than just currently in use?

Sophie - Ooh, I don't know, but I absolutely love that idea. I always say as a curator, I love people looking to history and the idea of people looking to history books could always be a great starting point or inspiration for any research project.