2000 year old secret remedy hidden in ancient books

The first time Grigory Kessel held the 1,000-year-old book, he was surprised because it looked familiar.

Manuscript at Batlitmore. Photo: NY Times

Dr. Kessel, a Syria scholar at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, was sitting in the library of the book's owner, a wealthy collector of rare scientific documents in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Kessel then realized that, just three weeks earlier, in the Harvard library, he had seen a book with similar drawings. The book contained an ancient Syrian medical text, a translation of the work of Galen, the Greek physician and philosopher who died in 200 BC. The book was missing several pages, and Dr. Kessel was suddenly struck by the thought that they were in Boston.

“I couldn’t even imagine what it looked like,” Kessel said. “When I saw the manuscript, I just had the impression that I had seen it somewhere. And then I remembered that I had seen a similar page in the Harvard library.”

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Dr. Kessel returned to the Harvard library and retrieved the missing page. He analyzed the page’s dimensions, handwriting, and other elements, as well as the text embedded in the scrapings, and determined that it was indeed a page from an ancient medical manuscript from Baltimore. However, six more pages were still missing.

He searched through 10 famous libraries that housed ancient Syrian manuscripts, either by cross-referencing manuscripts online or occasionally visiting the library himself. He finally found another page in the Christian Monastery of Mount Sinai, the holiest mountain in all religions, located in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. It is one of the oldest libraries in the world.

Another page was found in the French national library in Paris, and another in the Vatican library. However, three pages are still missing.

The manuscript Dr. Kessel approached was made of scraped sheepskin, a new layer of writing over the old. Centuries ago, this was a common way to recycle leather. For this manuscript, 11th-century Syrian missionaries scraped off Galen’s copy of the medical text and wrote hymns over it.

Scientists are just beginning to understand a little about this manuscript, Galen's "Simple Medicines - Preparation and Actions." It will help us understand the origins of the medicine, and how it was passed down to modern science.

"It's incredibly important in many ways," said Peter Pormann, a Greek-Arabic expert at the University of Manchester, UK, who led the study of the text.

For centuries, Galen's "Simple Prescriptions" was the go-to medical text for physicians. It served as a textbook on ancient medicine, patient care, and the use of medicinal herbs. Galen described a root that cured "throat thorns," and touted hemp as a remedy for earaches "without causing flatulence."

Much of “Simple Remedies” was translated into Syriac by the Middle Eastern Christian community. It is likely that the hidden characters in the 9th-century palimpsest are copies of the first Syriac translation from the 6th century.

"Today, it doesn't seem like anything special when someone translates from one language to another. But at the time, it was a huge achievement," said Dr. Kessel. "He had to create vocabularies, find Syrian equivalents to translate this Greek medical vocabulary."

"Simple Prescriptions" is a large work, consisting of 11 volumes. Galen's work was copied in many versions over the centuries, becoming a bridge between ancient Greek medical experts and Islamic society. The Syriac translations were easier to understand and translate into Arabic than the Greek original.

The Baltimore manuscript was sold to a private collector in 2002. Then, in 2009, he loaned it to the Walters Art Museum. A team of experts took spectral images of the pages. Each page was photographed with a high-resolution digital camera, maximizing the letters scraped away beneath the parchment. That team included Dr. Kessel, a research associate at the Dumbarton Oaks Harvard Library in Washington.

No one knows how many basic prescriptions Galen's manuscripts contain. The Syriac copies kept in the British Library in London contain only volumes 6-8.

Scholars are eager to compare the Baltimore manuscript in Syriac with the Greek copy, which was copied from Galen's original centuries later. Because the texts were copied many times, they changed significantly from the original.

A copyist may have removed parts they deemed unimportant, or added new knowledge based on medical advances. Comparing the copy found in Baltimore with the one in the British Library will help to understand how the ancient Greeks treated disease, and how it spread to the Middle East.

“Some of it is not scientific by modern standards,” Kessel said. Like many other ancient physicians, Galen believed that health was controlled by the balance of four elements: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. All disease in the body is caused by an excess or deficiency of these elements.

"Galen's medical system was absolutely insane," said Dr. Siam Bahyro, a Jewish studies expert at the University of Exeter, England. However, according to him, it was the most advanced medical thinking of the time.

“We can discover things we never dreamed of,” said Dr. Pormann, who led the research into the ancient manuscript.

According to VnExpress