Datamining medieval medical texts for modern medicines

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Medieval manuscripts contain numerous remedies for the treatment of microbial infections, and these often involve complex preparations of several ingredients. These combinations of natural compounds could be the result of empirical work by premodern physicians to produce efficacious remedies. However, quantitative analyses of how medieval physicians used the materials available to them to create remedies, and empirical tests of the antimicrobial activity of whole remedies, are almost non-existent. The datamining of medieval medical texts using the tools of network analysis is a new way to evaluate combinations of antimicrobial ingredients in medieval recipes, and to identify significant ingredient combinations from an antimicrobial perspective. This is a novel route to developing new antimicrobial therapeutics in a time of increasing antimicrobial resistance.This study raises questions relevant to medieval studies, digital humanities, and modern scientific research. Medieval studies might ask: Did medieval physicians follow a predictable rational method? Where we see contingencies of different remedies for a condition, what conclusions can be drawn about the methodology of medieval practitioners? Digital humanities might ask: How can the latest technological tools enhance our discovery and understanding of novel compounds in premodern medical texts? Finally contemporary medicine might ask: Do 'ancientbiotic' combinations hold the key to discovering new natural compounds, or cocktails of compounds, that could form the basis of novel treatments for infection? Thus far research has been concentrated around single specific recipes from select medieval texts. But we can use digital technologies, specifically community detection and network analysis, to conduct a larger-scale survey of ingredients from multiple medieval texts. This may provide a foundation to begin to build evidenced answers to such questions.One of my key research endeavours is to investigate how the medieval past can inform modern understandings of science and the arts. Previous studies, in collaboration with a specialist in complex networks, developed an analytical pipeline for transforming medieval texts into electronic databases for analysis with complex network algorithms. The objective is to develop a new direction of collaborative research in which the knowledge of the past may prove to be relevant for modern research. This may lay the foundation for future collaborations between the arts and sciences in the quest to find new approaches to the need for new antimicrobials.The data that are available from medieval remedies are based on multi-component ingredients, which have the potential to activate novel compounds, react synergistically with other ingredients, or attack bacteria in different ways. There is an urgent need to investigate the effects of multi-component remedies against polymicrobial wounds. The proposed research specifically targets the multi-component nature of medieval remedies in a systematic, mathematically-quantified methodology. The research from this project will form a foundation to support a broad programme of research into the use of different materia medica and for a re-examination of the ethnopharmacology of Western Europe.