What were the attempted Black Death cures that the Medieval people tried?

Answer 1

Cures ranged from the ridiculous to the more practical, and also contained some old-wives tale prevention methods:

• Throw sweet smelling herbs onto the fire to clean the air.
• Carry pockets of sweet-smelling herbs
• Plague-proofing homes by putting glazes over southern windows to block the polluted southern wind
• Sit in a sewer so the bad air of the plague is driven off by the even worse one of the sewer.
• Drink a medicine of ten year old treacle.
• Swallow a powder of crushed emeralds.
• Bloodletting.
• Place live hen next to the boils to help draw out pestilence from the body.
• Drink a glass of your own urine to aid recovery
• No bathing, exercising, or physical intimacy was allowed during that time
• No sleeping during the daytime
• Avoid sad thoughts or thoughts of death and disease
• Victim gets washed with vinegar and rosewater
• Don't eat meat, figs or fish, but instead eat fruits, vegetables and bread
• Lance the buboes, and apply a mixture of tree resin, roots of white lilies and dried human excrement should be applied to the places where the body has been cut open.
• Clean the streets of all human and animal waste; burn all dead bodies and excrement outside the village in a large deep pit
• Pestilence medicine: Roast the shells of newly laid eggs and ground the roasted shells into a powder. Chop up leaves and petals of marigold flowers. mix egg shells and marigolds into a pot of good ale. Add treacle and warm over a fire. The patient should drink this mixture every morning and night.
• Use of religion (i.e., praying to God) to end this Black Plague once and for all
• And other things

Answer 2

Cures tried for the "black death" that started in 1348:

Some of the more "creative" cures that were tried were:

• Witchcraft: place a live hen next to the victim which was supposed to suck out the buboes (huge black boils that were one of the main symptoms of black plague).

• Those affected were told to drink their own urine twice a day

• Drink a mixture of ale, crushed marigold flower petals, leaves, crushed egg shell and treacle (like molasses) every day.

• Burst the buboes so they would drain, this probably just led to a secondary bacterial infection since they did not understand sterilization and infectious microbes.

There were some more scientifically sound attempts to deal with the plague, though, based on the science of the day, such as:

• King Henry VIII in the 16th century decreed that every farmer must own a cat. They knew by then that the plague was spread by fleas, that carried the disease from infected and dead rats and mice, so this logical approach was used to help halt the spread.

Answer 3

One of the cures was to put a TOAD on the boils and the toad would suck up all the pus and blood and finally burst. There was also the cure of putting leeches on your skin so they would suck the blood out, this didn't work however as the leeches sucked most your blood out and you would die from lack of blood. Leaving a dead toad or frog to dry and then putting that in a boil was one.

But as you probably know, these remedies did not work.

Answer 4

Answerwell I'm not really that sure but i think they tried to keep the people with the black death away! AnswerThey avoided contact with people who were sick (as the first answer indicates), but this did not work well because the problem was being spread by fleas, rats, and mice.

They also kept people away, in at least one walled town, by raising the drawbridges as soon as they heard about the plague and waiting until it was passed to put them back down. This was another way of keeping people with the black death away (as the first answer indicates) but in this case it did work, at least until the plague came back, years later.

They tried other things, such as making sure everything smelled nice, surrounding themselves with roses, posies, or going the other route and wearing garlic. They tried wearing nose covers that looked like birds' beaks and had sweet smelling things in the. They tried burning people they thought were bad, especially Jews. And they tried walking about the countryside whipping themselves or mutually whipping each other. None of these worked, of course.