Medical therapeutics and the place of healing in early medieval Culmen in Poland

ABSTRACT

This article presents examples of medical therapeutics based on artefacts, paleobotanical and osteological materials from early medieval (tenth– thirteenth-century) Culmen, as well as historical and ethnographic sources from Poland. Culmen comprised a stronghold, settlement and cemetery and was an important place for the early Piast state. In the eleventh century it was a centre of Piast power and in the twelfth century it became a castellany. The inhabitants of Culmen developed healthcare and healing practices which involved the use of objects: knives, sickles, belemnites; plants: elderflower, willow, narrow-leaf plantain, knot-grass, water-lily, guelder rose and hazels; as well as the bones of cats, dogs, horses and cattle. Special prayers and incantations also played an important role in healing practices. Feature 4/98, which is interpreted as a stone altar, was a designated place of magic and religious rituals connected with healing in Culmen.

KEYWORDS:

• Medicine
• health
• care
• Middle Ages
• Poland

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments, which helped to elaborate on many issues that are discussed in this article. We would like to thank Professor Daniel Makowiecki for the discussion, which allowed us to conceptualize research on medicine in early medieval Culmen. We would also like to thank Mikołaj Lisowski for fruitful discussion, Dr Joanna Abramów for providing an unpublished PhD thesis and Patryk Banasiak for providing an unpublished Bachelor’s dissertation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We do not agree with Janowski and Kurasiński (2010) that półkosek from grave 13 from site 2 might be considered as a sickle. The sickle is a crop tool with smooth or serrated 30–40-cm-long blade of semi-circular or elliptical shape. The Półkosek was another type of a tool that was used for cutting plants although it was similar to a sickle. The Pólkosek has straight or slightly curved more than 30 cm-long blade (Janowski and Kurasiński 2010). Only the curved ending of the półkosek from grave 13 at Culmen is preserved so it is hard to reconstruct how of the rest of the tool looked like and if it were also curved. Such a small fragment of the półkosek from Culmen do not allow us to perform a reconstruction that would indicate how similar it was to a sickle. For this reason we consider the sickle from grave 24 at Culmen the only one.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre of Poland under grant number UMO-2014/13/N/HS3/04602. We do not have any financial interest or benefit arising from the direct application of this research.

Notes on contributors

Magdalena Domicela Matczak

Magdalena Domicela Matczak received her Ph.D. from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She was a Research Fellow at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the principal investigator of the project on the social status of the diseased and the disabled, their biographies, medical treatment and burial customs in 2015–2016. Her numerous articles and book chapters focus on disability, the body, emotion, and early medieval Poland.

Wojciech Chudziak

Wojciech Chudziak is a Professor and the head of the Department of Archaeology at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. He is the author of numerous articles and books on early medieval Poland, Slavic beliefs, ritual practices, chamber graves, the settlement of Pomerania and early medieval pottery.