QJM vol. 98 no. 1 © Association of Physicians 2005; all rights reserved.
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The medics of Myddfai
I recently logged on to the web site of NICE, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, in order to check their official guidelines for treating hypertension. I was delighted to see that they offer the option of reading these in either English or Cymraeg. The sceptics among you might snort at this choice, for who in Wales could possibly be interested in such guidelines and incapable of reading them in English? The question, of course, misses the point. The Cymraeg version is there not for utilitarian purposes. It is there in the cause of continuity.There are no indigenous people left in Britain, but the Celtic peoples, including the Welsh, have the nearest claim to being aboriginals, having arrived from central Europe several centuries before the Romans. Seen through Welsh eyes, the rest of us are all relative newcomers, whether our forebears came as Angles, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, Afro-Caribbeans, Ugandan Asians, or whatever. The survival of some of the Celtic languages on these islands through wave after wave of invasion and colonization over more than two millennia is historically quite remarkable. Waiting last weekend at the till of Safeway in Denbigh, I could hear more people speaking Cymraeg than English—a fact that would astonish most of my fellow Londoners, who could probably not even identify the language if they heard it being spoken.
Most modern Saesneg folk (equivalent to the Scots ‘Sassenachs’, or Saxons) are fairly ignorant of how much of our history in Britain is essentially that of the Celts, and of their interaction with successive conquerors and competitors. Yet in the Middle Ages, when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about ‘thise olde gentil Britouns’ he did not mean the people we would now call the British. He meant the Celts. In Victorian times, George Borrow, a Norfolk vicar who taught himself Welsh and wrote the classic travelogue ‘Wild Wales’, still used the word Briton to mean the Welsh, as opposed to English people like himself. One of the things that he shared with the Welsh whom he met on his journey was a hatred of all things Norman, including castles, fashion and snobbery.
If as a profession we showed some interest in our Celtic past, more doctors living east of the river Severn might be aware of Britain's longest medical dynasty: Meddygon Myddfai, or the physicians of Myddfai in Carmarthenshire. They can be traced back to the early thirteenth century and their line continued in the village for over five hundred years until the last of them, John Jones, was buried there in 1739. The first recorded name among them was Rhiwallon Feddyg, physician to the local lord Rhys Gryg (Rhys the Hoarse or the Stammerer). Rhiwallon was followed by his three sons Cadwgan, Gruffydd and Einon. Their recipes are described in a manuscript which has survived from the late fourteenth century in Jesus College, Oxford. These contain directions concerning the quantities and methods of preparation for the herbal ingredients—most unusual for European medicine at the time.
Modern research into the remedies—now being undertaken at the National Botanic Gardens in Wales—is proving a challenge. Not surprisingly, the terminology for plants and herbs has been inconsistent down the centuries. Inaccurate translations into English have also confused matters, and in addition, the botany of modern Myddfai does not appear to correspond with the mediaeval account. All the same, Welsh pharmaceutical researchers are now looking at native plants specified in the manuscript that contain compounds similar to tropical ones that have anti-HIV and anti-tumour properties. If that particular project fails, perhaps they may at least establish the exact methods by which the physicians of mediaeval Myddfai concocted some of their more mundane remedies: for toothache, piles and halitosis.
As with much mediaeval history, the stories of Meddygon Myddfai contain some credible facts mixed together with a great deal of fantastical legend. Rhiwallon is said to have been the son of ‘the lady of Llyn-y-fan’, one of three nymphs who arose together from the lake near Myddfai, as an apparition before a local farmer. ‘After a little conversation with them,’ according to one version of the story, ‘he commanded sufficient courage to make proposals of marriage to one of them.’ The following day the farmer passed the lady's first challenge: to distinguish her from her two identical sisters. He did so by noticing the pattern of strapping on her sandals (after she had wiggled her foot suggestively to make sure he noticed). In consequence, ‘the lady engaged to live with him until such time as he would strike her three times without cause’.
Inevitably, this second challenge was one that he was bound to fail. The different accounts of the story vary in the details, including how many years it took before he delivered the three disastrous blows, how severe they were, and how many sons she bore him before this happened. One of the accounts describes how he merely touched her gently on the arm three times to remind her to fetch his horse, saying ‘dos, dos, dos’ (‘go, go, go’). It was enough: she returned at once to the lake, taking with her the seven cows, two oxen and a bull that she had originally brought up from the waters as her dowry. But she did reappear, at least once more, to present her son Rhiwallon with a bag of medicines.
Alas, there is no word in any of the versions concerning whether or not her bag also contained any official treatment guidelines, in English or in Cymraeg.
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