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It’s January and everyone’s getting sick. There are about four hours of light each day, and even those are often impeded by rainclouds, lectures or a hangover that confines you to bed until 2pm when it starts getting dark. You’d love to go to the doctors but prescriptions cost £7.85 and you’ve just paid your battels. However, everyone on your floor is going to be ill too soon unless you sort it out. What better way to cure a winter ailment than by turning to the advice of our forefathers?

Bald’s Leechbook is an Old English medical text from around the ninth-century. Nobody knows who Bald was, but an inscription in the front proudly proclaims ‘Bald owns this book’. As in a modern medical book, there’s a handy index to help you identify the problem. There are remedies for sore throats, shivering fits, pain in the joints, bleeding of the nose, bleeding in general, spot eruptions and stomach ache. There are also remedies for other less common ailments: insanity, the atrocities of all fiends, and demonic possession. Hmm, maybe save those for later on in term.

The remedies are heavily based in common-sense, making them perfect for the busy student. For example, if you want your hair to grow faster, you can smear your scalp in a mixture of willow-leaves and dead bees (willows grow fast, and bees are hairy). To stop your hair growing, apply ant’s eggs (because eggs are hairless, obviously.) The name for an infection is ‘flying venom’, because contagious diseases are caused by elves or evil witches who roam the land shooting people with invisible darts. Another great thing is that most of the ingredients for its remedies can be found in Uni Parks or Tesco. Bald’s solution for ‘a woman’s madness’, for example, is to eat a radish every morning before breakfast. Honey is a cure for everything, including pox, obstructed birth and theft. A surprising amount of ailments can be cured by beer of various strengths (but we knew that).

The Leechbook is a must-have for all hypochondriacs, beauty queens, and those who have sold their soul to the devil (Topshop?). After all, possession by a fiend can be cured by a ‘pleasant drink’ of carrot, beetroot, radish and mint, which I’m pretty sure you can get in Prêt à Manger. 

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