A thousand year old English remedy may hold the key to treating drug-resistant bacteria, researchers have revealed.
The remedy, made as a brew by ancient physicians, was found in a manuscript in the British Library and was used by the Anglo-Saxons to treat eye infections.
The book, Bald’s Leechbook, was found by an academic at Nottingham University – who then invited microbiologists to test the remedy.
They say the results are "astonishing."
Laboratory studies found it killed 90% of drug-resistant MRSA bacteria infecting wounds in laboratory mice.
The brew involves bile from a cow’s stomach, two species of the garlic family and wine. It has to be made by a specific technique in a brass vessel.
The researchers say not just the ingredients but the technique may be critical to creating chemicals that can destroy MRSA.
They reported their findings yesterday to the conference of the Society for General Microbiology in Birmingham, UK, yesterday.
Microbiologist Dr Freya Harrison said: “We thought that Bald’s eyesalve might show a small amount of antibiotic activity, because each of the ingredients has been shown by other researchers to have some effect on bacteria in the lab – copper and bile salts can kill bacteria, and the garlic family of plants make chemicals that interfere with the bacteria’s ability to damage infected tissues. But we were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was.
"We tested it in difficult conditions too; we let our artificial infections grow into dense, mature populations called biofilm’, where the individual cells bunch together and make a sticky coating that makes it hard for antibiotics to reach them.
"But unlike many modern antibiotics, Bald’s eye salve has the power to breach these defences.”
Fellow researcher Dr Steve Diggle said: “When we built this recipe in the lab I didn’t really expect it to actually do anything. When we found that it could actually disrupt and kill cells in S. aureus biofilms, I was genuinely amazed. Biofilms are naturally antibiotic resistant and difficult to treat so this was a great result.
"The fact that it works on an organism that it was apparently designed to treat (an infection of a stye in the eye), suggests that people were doing carefully planned experiments long before the scientific method was developed.”
Dr Cristina Lee, an expert in Viking studies, said: “Medieval leech books and herbaria contain many remedies designed to treat what are clearly bacterial infections (weeping wounds/sores, eye and throat infections, skin conditions such as erysipelas, leprosy and chest infections).
"Given that these remedies were developed well before the modern understanding of germ theory, this poses two questions: How systematic was the development of these remedies? And how effective were these remedies against the likely causative species of bacteria?
"Answering these questions will greatly improve our understanding of medieval scholarship and medical empiricism, and may reveal new ways of treating serious bacterial infections that continue to cause illness and death.”
Image copyright: The British Library Board (Royal 12 D xvii)
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