A 10th Century potion designed to treat eye infections has been found effective against Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a difficult-to-treat, antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection. MRSA is called a “superbug.”
Dr Christina Lee, an Anglo-Saxon expert from the School of English at the University of Nottingham in England was perusing Bald’s Leechbook, an Old English leather-bound volume in the British Library, when she found a recipe for eye infections. She brought this to the attention of microbiologists at Nottingham.
The recipe calls for two species of Allium (garlic and onion or leek), wine and oxgall (bile from a cow’s stomach). It describes a very specific method of making the topical solution including the use of a brass vessel to brew it in, a straining to purify it and an instruction to leave the mixture for nine days before use.
The microbiologists made several batches of the potion for testing. Yes, it does work on eye infections. They tested it on other infections as well and found that it killed up to 90% of MRSA infections in bacterial cultures and mice. The testing was confirmed by additional testing at Texas Tech University.
Testing “found that when the medicine is too dilute to kill Staphylococcus aureus, it interfered with bacterial cell-cell communication (quorum sensing). This is a key finding, because bacteria have to talk to each other to switch on the genes that allow them to damage infected tissues. Many microbiologists think that blocking this behavior could be an alternative way of treating infection.”
Dr Lee said: “We were genuinely astonished at the results of our experiments in the lab. We believe modern research into disease can benefit from past responses and knowledge, which is largely contained in non-scientific writings. But the potential of these texts to contribute to addressing the challenges cannot be understood without the combined expertise of both the arts and science.”
Read more on this story from a University of Nottingham press release