Medieval Wellness Tips

Except that any historian of medicine will tell you that pharmaceuticals well into the 18th century were dominated by ideas of "potency" where surely things would have beneficial effect because they have powerful smells or whatever. Uses of animal excrement are exceedingly common in early-modern remedy guides.

They also omit any reference to religion or what we would call the supernatural, both common in medical texts of the time.

> warm bed waiting

Sore from a beating are ya?

It's a shame they didn't have a cure for the uncomfortable feeling of having coffee in the sinuses!

2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine was for an ancient Chinese medicine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou

Maybe an old phrase meaning "rabid dog" or "raged dog". Rabies was probably orders of magnitude more common of an occurrence back then (which is non-existent in most Western countries right now).

It is probably hard to find a dog that is completely red, so there is no way to verify the cure beforehand. People must have thought the cure was rubbish even in medieval times.

I read somewhere here on HN that medieval colors weren't precisely accurate. I wonder if red also meant brown or reddish-brown and dogs like the Rhodesian Ridgeback would qualify.

If you smell like sh*t, people will not come near you, and hence this keeps possible human infectious diseases away.

London, and other towns and cities, had a bit of a shit problem in the 1300s. Streets full of horse and human shit, households throwing their waste into the streets and/or river or if lucky selling it to a nearby cloth dyer, water dangerous to drink so best stick to beer or wine, the serious health risk from floors covered in rushes. OK, if you were posh enough there was a chute from the privvy straight into the moat or river. Oh and the river was where the leftovers from the slaughter houses went.

I think it's fair to say that smell and hygiene expectation was a little different in the middle ages. Cured, if wealthy enough, with a pomander - a ball full of nicely smelly herbs and oils that you carried as portable gas mask.

He’ll forget he got a beating though, so consider this a medieval painkiller with severe side-effects (1).

(1) side-effects may include nausea, vomiting and loss of sense of smell

The recipe requires you to put frog bones in a stream and pick out the bone that moves against the stream... You might run out of frogs before finding such a bone!

Well, it's probably warm and soft?

It's free, and if your 'cure' doesn't work you can imply the person didn't try hard enough.

Same reason why most 'magic potions' include hard to achieve steps (steal church parchments, estract the liver of a dog, etc.).

It is not that dumb. Eating camel dung for example helps with serious stomach infections, its old and well known Bedouin trick (tested by Wehrmacht soldiers in Africa during WWII).

Apart from parasites and bacteria shit could be beneficial in theory - as its full of minerals and could help to regenerate skin etc.

Humans are one of the only animals that don’t eat poop. The benefits of poo exposure is an increased diversity of gut bacteria and biome, which we are just starting to understand the benefits of.

This is one big benefit of having a dog.

I've seen some posts about fermenting your own urine and such. Ew.

Sometimes I'll be reading a blog with what I think is decent health advice then suddenly that stupid feet-to-body-parts diagram appears and I have to actively forget what I just read.

Well... there is this thing called fecal transplant, which some may argue works.

Medieval Housewife Discovers One Weird Trick For Curing Bruises - Grooms Hate Her!

I suspect that some context has been lost. 'Invisible' probably doesn't mean literally transparent. It may mean invisible to God, a free pass for sin. That would dovetail with the other powers of this device.