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The Monastic Museum of Denmark |
Script and the written word | Technology and work
Ground-plan | The museum garden | The brewer's garden
The art of healing and skeletons
Every Cistercian monk was bled four times a year and it was performed using a lancet.
The hospital at the Monastery of Øm shows that by the end of the Middle Ages the monks ran a hospital and performed hospital work in the broadest sense for the people living in the surrounding areas of the monastery.
The monks were forbidden to shed blood therefore surgery lay outside their field. Nevertheless it is possible to remark that surgery was used in the treatment of broken bones and after battles.
An accidental shot fired from a crossbow has hit a five-year old in the lower-jaw causing death, though a serious injury to the hipbone caused by a lance or spear was cured. The operations have most likely been emergency ones.
Parts of the hospital were excavated between 1994 and 1996, and the ruins reveal a particularly large hospital. During the 1500's the monastery also possessed a chemist who was employed to prescribe drugs to the patients. In the exhibition many of the tools used to heal the sick are on show. The hospital did not only function as a modern hospital. The old, pilgrims and others also lived in the hospital building, making it a sort of nursing home in the Middle Ages.
Presumably all monasteries had a herb garden. Many of the plants were imported by the monks from their southern lands of origin. The monks of the Monastery of Øm cultivated a wide selection of medicinal herbs, some with provable medicinal benefit.
The herbs were used both medicinally and in food.
In the ruins of the monastery many of the old herbs still grow.
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