Leechbooks

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Old English medical manuscripts that collected herbal cures, charms and treatments compiled by early physicians
2. Medieval written collections of healing recipes and remedies, often drawing on herbs, prayers and folk practice
3. Handbooks from the Anglo-Saxon period recording medicinal prescriptions and remedies for various ailments

Etymology: "Leechbooks" is the plural of "leechbook," and the word's most surprising feature is that its first element means "doctor." In Old English, "lǣċe" was a medical practitioner, and the term is related to the modern "leech," a word that today suggests only the bloodsucking worm, which was used in medicine for bloodletting. The word for the healer survived in Middle English as "leche," meaning doctor or physician, before that sense faded from ordinary use while the creature kept the name. A leechbook was, quite literally, a book of the leech. The second element, "boc," is the ordinary Old English word for book, so the compound is a plain combination of "healer" and "book." These manuscripts gathered remedies, herbal recipes, charms and treatments, and they survive as some of the earliest written records of English medicine, the Old English texts that show how practitioners of the period understood illness and cure.