Re-Creating Another Ancient Bruise Treatment Before My Radishes Die in the Crisper
It’s been an experience we’ve all had, the vegetables placed in the crisper looking sadder and sadder as each day we fail to use them passes. I had a good reason for ignoring these sad little bulbs: I have been unwell pretty much since Friday evening. I mention my feeling unwell because as a result, I failed to pay great attention to amounts used in the preparation. I tried, but keeping track of the honey was just too hard. I apologise for this in advance, but I will say that perhaps it made the experience more authentic.
This final blog will address the radish-based treatment which I forgot to prepare for last Thursday evening. The other two blogs were HOW NOT TO MAKE NERO’S BRUISE-REMOVING CERATE and THAT BRUISE LOOKS UGLY: RE-CREATING ROMAN TREATMENTS TO REMOVE BRUISING. All of these addressed the re-creation (to one degree or another) of treatments outlined in the Medicina Plinii, a third century CE traveller’s medical guide.
I didn’t really want to do this while feeling sick, but the radishes were starting to look like I felt - not good - so I made myself get into action.
The bruise treatment I re-created was the first listed in the Medicina Plinii (3.30.1):
Ground radish’s skin is applied to a recent bruise with honey.
This combination is recounted in numerous Greek texts, but the author of the Medicina Plinii got it from Pliny the Elder (20.13.24) who wrote:
...in fact [apply] skin [of radish] with honey to a fresh bruise…
Background: using modern produce
I probably should have mentioned this in my previous blog, but I think this holds truer of root vegetables than herbs: we cannot accurately reproduce ancient recipes because of the degree of change initiated on plants. I read in reparation for this that some ecologist had managed to make a significant change to radish stamens in 5 years and hypothesised that he could undo that change in another 5 years. Agriculture changes plants and as a result modern plants are significantly different from ancient plants. And this doesn’t even take into account evolution.
Consider Pliny the Elder’s (10.26.78) description of radishes:
Radishes consist of an outer skin (cortex) and a cartilage, and with many of them the skin is even thicker than the bark of some kinds of trees. They have an extremely pungent flavour, which varies in proportion to the thickness of the skin.
The radishes I used did not have a very thick cortex at all. Indeed, I looked to online videos of people preparing foraged wild radish to get a better idea of exactly what parts of the radish should be considered the skin.¹ The “cortex” of the wild radish is far more pronounced than the radishes we eat, but with careful viewing and cutting, I was able to discern the more “fleshy” part of the skin under the purple pigmentation.
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| The white underlayer started to come away from the rest of the bulb with the pink/purple outer-skin. It is slightly comparable to what happens with the wild variety. |
I started looking at the wild radish because our cultivated radish was developed from it. Logically, the ancient radish would therefore have more in common with its wild cousin than today’s radish.
So proposing that re-creations, especially those featuring fruits and vegetables, as being identical to those made in the past is rather disingenuous.
Despite this, I still think it is valid to re-create these treatments:
- As I shared above, human involved unnatural selection can change elements of a radish in 5 years. This means that the radish used by readers of the Medicina Plinii (whose readership and use lasted a millennium), might have differed significantly from the radish described by Pliny the Elder.
- The very act of re-creating a process can provide insight.
- For teaching purposes, people engage with something better when they can look at it, sniff it, and touch it. Whether you describe this as phenomenological or history of the senses is your choice. And, I must admit that I find that even as the creator, I find this kind of engagement far more meaningful, even though I cannot describe why.
The Process
This remedy is quite simple. I trimmed the now very wilted leaves from my 8 radishes and washed the bulbs. I then trimmed the spindly end of the root.
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| They really did look tired. |
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| Removing the greens and a wash improved them immensely. |
I then started my attempts to find the correct depth of the skin. This took patience and precise cutting.
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| I managed an almost full one! |
Once I realised where I had gone wrong on previous attempts, I went back to collect all of the skin.
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| Radishes look weird naked! |
Once I had skinned all 8, I put the skins into my mortar and ground them up as much as my sick self could be bothered. The outer pink/purple part of the skin did not want to come apart and retained some integrity. Truthfully, I don’t believe any more grinding would have made any difference.
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| All ground up. |
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| Notice that at this time there is no liquid in the bottom of the bowl. And that I tried to take measurements. I really did! |
I then heated my honey (see my previous blog for my discussion on the honey I am using) to remove most of its crystals. Strangely, as I stirred in honey, the stirring action seemed to release juice from the ground skins. This liquid allowed me to dissolve some of the small crystals within the honey which heating failed to remove. This liquid is not just some honey.
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| All that juice after I added the honey. And the radishes still look weird. |
I did place some of the ground radish skin on my arm before I added to honey, and while it didn’t strictly adhere, it did not roll off my skin. With the honey added, I had juice wanting to drip down the sides. I do wonder if this was something you would bandage on?
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| Some of the treatment on my arm for a moment. It looks a little like raspberry jam. |
Ancient Medical Logic and Modern Science
Like I said in my previous blog, the whole idea behind this was to encourage blood flow to the site to encourage healing. Radish is not as irritating as garlic, which is likely why this was not cooked. What is interesting is that the chemical compounds that give radish its “heat”, iosthiocyanates, are only released upon tissue disruption: mechanical damage caused by cutting, chewing, or grinding in a mortar.² I think it is interesting that the preparation method outlined was that which would cause the most damage, and thus presumably create the most active ingredients.
In comparing the directions for the garlic treatment outlined in my previous post, and this, there appears to be evidence to suggest that the people who developed these irritant-based treatments knew that special preparations needed to be made to ensure that the active element would be activated as required (more or less), which I personally find fascinating.
I cannot find a reason to limit the treatment to the skin alone, but in my current state that does not mean there is not one. I do have an hypothesis that I feel too rotten to follow up on though: perhaps it was to limit the amount of the juice? If the juice came from the white, only using the skin (cortex) limits the amount. I did not find anything to suggest that this part of the bulb differed chemically from the inner flesh.
It is also interesting that the various iosthiocyanates from the Brassicaceae family have been found to have anti-inflammatory properties.³ I cannot make any confident discussion about what this might suggest about this treatment because all studies have related to rheumatoid diseases and non-topical uses. In any case, I do think this is interesting given that bruising is often accompanied with a different variety of inflammation.
Conclusions
This completes my trio of Medicina Plinii treatments for bruises blogs. I personally found the re-creation of these treatments informative, and I am assuming if you are still reading, you did too.
The inclusion of ten treatments for bruising (I am not including the salt heat pack) in this chapter of the Medicina Plinii was to give people various options with their treatment because radishes were not necessarily available all year. That said, it was definitely the prettiest of all the re-creations. I really wish I had remembered it for last Thursday.
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