Healing Manuals from Ottoman and Modern Greece

The Medical Recipes of Gymnasios Lauriōtis in Context

Steven M. Oberhelman

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110661231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: History

This book is a study of three iatrosofia (the notebooks of traditional healers) from the Ottoman and modern periods of Greece. The main text is a collection of the medical recipes of the monk Gymnasios Lauri?tis (b. 1858). Gymnasios had a working knowledge of over 2, 000 plants and their use in medical treatments. Two earlier iatrosofia are used for parallels for Gymnasios's recipes. One was written c. 1800 by a practical doctor near Khania, Crete, and illustrated by a second hand. The second iatrosofion dates to the sixteenth century; ascribed to a Meletios, the text survives in the Codex Vindobonensis gr. med. 53. The contents of these and other iatrosofia are predominantly medical, with many of the remedies taken from folk medicine, classical and Hellenistic pharmacological writers, and Galen.

The book opens with a biography of the monk Gymnasios and his recipes and then a description of the Cretan and Meletios iatrosofia. The iatrosophia, their role in Greek medical history, and the methods of healing are the subject of chapter 2. The Greek text of Gymnasios's recipes are accompanied by a facing English translation. A commentary offers for each of Gymnasios's recipes passages (translated into English) from the two other iatrosophia to serve as parallels, as well as an analysis of the pharmacopoeia in the medical texts. The book concludes with Greek and English indices of the material medica (plants, mineral, and animal substances) and the diseases, and then a general index.

Part 1: Three Γιατρoσόφια

Chapter 1 Authors, Texts, and Healing

I Gymnasios Lauriōtis

The Author

Figure 1: The Monk Gymnasios Lauriōtis.

Gymnasios Lauriōtis, né Geōrgios Tzanetis, was born in 1858 in the small mountain village of Theologos in the central mountains of the Greek island of Thasos¹. His family had moved from the island of Skopelos four years earlier², and when Gymnasios was 15 years old, moved from Theologos to the village of Potamia on the eastern side of the island³. The father earned his living as a miller, while Gymnasios himself took on various trades, including shoemaking. Gymnasios’s upbringing led him to pursue botany⁴. His mother was a midwife who used herbal recipes that she had learned from her father, himself an herbalist⁵. Gymnasios’s grandfather healed local villagers’ stomach ailments, wounds, kidney problems, and rheumatism, thanks to medical recipes that he had copied from a manuscript he had read at a Mount Athos monastery library⁶. Gymnasios told Iōannou Primikidis, a reporter for the newspaper Ταχυδρόμος in Kavala, the mainland city directly across from Thasos, that as a child he memorized his grandfather’s recipes and also closely observed his mother’s healing practices⁷. At the age of 20 (in 1878), Gymnasios served time as a cabin attendant on a sailboat in the northern Aegean, but shortly afterwards went to England where he was hired as a nurse in the practice of an herbalist/physician named Kazis⁸. This healer, recognizing Gymnasios’s extensive botanical knowledge, taught him anatomy and herbalism⁹. Gymnasios worked in Kazis’s clinic for several years before returning to Greece. In Thessaloniki he served an apprenticeship with the physician Kōnstantinidis who further instructed him in herbal medicine¹⁰. Gymnasios, traveling throughout the towns and villages surrounding Thessaloniki, treated patients under Kōnstantinidis’s supervision¹¹. Gymnasios tried his hand at his own medical practice in Serres, about 80 kilometers north of Thessaloniki, but was unsuccessful, doubtlessly because of his lack of experience¹². He moved north to the Thracian city of Xanthi, where he became a cook for a Turkish landowner named Mehmet Ali. After two years and another stint as a cook on an estate, Gymnasios moved back to the island of Thasos to settle on his parents’ farm outside the village of Potamia. Gymnasios married, but his wife died after only 15 days from cardiac syncope¹³.

Filled with grief over the unexpected death of his wife, Gymnasios left Thasos and traveled to Mount Athos, 60 kilometers distant to the southwest. He found residence at what he called a “σκητή” (“monastic community”) and began to devote himself fully to botany. Athonite monks had always been interested in medicinal plants and considered themselves guardians of the Greek herbal tradition that stretched back to ancient times¹⁴. Sir Arthur Hill¹⁵ described a plant collection expedition that he and two other botanists made in 1934 to the Athos peninsula. They encountered a monk whose knowledge of plants impressed them: He was walking in the fields in a long black robe collecting henbane and licorice root. What caught their eye was that he was carrying a large, black bulky bag, which contained four carefully wrapped manuscript folio volumes of Dioscorides’ 1^st-century A.D. treatise, De materia medica (On Medicinal Substances), which the monk said that he had himself copied¹⁶.

Gymnasios returned to England to help Kazis’s gravely ill son. When World War I broke out, Kazis enlisted in the British armed forces and was sent to Thessaloniki with a contingent of troops¹⁷. Gymnasios accompanied Kazis but proceeded to Thasos, where he worked at the English airbase as a cook and then as a nurse¹⁸. Later, an airplane¹⁹ on which Gymnasios was flying was shot down, crashing near the Monastery of Agia Anna at Mount Athos²⁰. Gymnasios was carried to the monastery where he underwent a lengthy course of treatment under the care of Spyridon, the monastery’s physician and an accomplished botanist²¹. Gymnasios decided to remain at Mount Athos and, assuming the name Gymnasios Lauriōtis, became a monk at Megisti Laura²². Gymnasios began to administer medical treatments to fellow monks and visitors to the monastery with such skill that his fame soon eclipsed Spyridon’s. Although Spyridon did his utmost to hinder Gymnasios’s healing practices, he was prohibited by the monastery’s council of elders, led by the superior Kornilios²³.

Gymnasios’s quiet life as a monastery nurse soon changed²⁴. Two ailing monks came to the monastery seeking relief from their illnesses. The monastery’s current physician was Paulos Paulidis, from the Turkish city of Trabzon, Spyridon having retired²⁵. Paulidis, after examining the monks, stated that nothing could be done—the best he could do was amputation—and that the monks needed to reconcile themselves to being disabled. Gymnasios overheard the conversation and privately approached the men, promising to heal them but only on the condition of silence. Gymnasios examined the monks and gave them herbs and plants to apply to their legs²⁶; later both men resumed walking about without difficulty. One of the men returned to the Monastery of Megisti Laura and told Paulidis that Gymnasios had performed a “miracle” (θαῦμα). Gymnasios was then subjected to a blistering verbal and even physical assault from Paulidis²⁷ and was forced to take refuge at the Monastery of Agia Anna. Upset over what he considered maltreatment because of a simple act of kindness, Gymnasios departed for Serres, where he resumed his former healing practice²⁸.

Eight months later and as 1928 drew to a close, Gymnasios moved back to Thasos, settling down in the village of Potamia where he became sexton of the local church²⁹. Gymnasios began to heal, but was not known beyond a small circle of villagers. In April of 1930 a spectacular healing changed Gymnasios’s life. A seventeen-year old boy, Stylianos Kontogiōrgoudis, from the Thasian village of Maries³⁰ was at the point of death. The father took the ailing boy to Gymnasios’s house and pleaded for help. After examining the boy, Gymnasios went outside and returned with handfuls of various plants (we are not told what they were). He gave the parents strict instructions: every morning they were to boil the plants and have the boy drink a teacup of the liquid in the morning and then a coffee cup in the evening. Gymnasios predicted that within three weeks a large cyst filled with pus would form in the boy’s thigh. He further told the parents that the boy’s vertebral column was filled with this same pus but that the plant decoction would purge it. Gymnasios reassured everyone that the boy would not die if his instructions were followed, and promised to return at the critical time (καιρός) to complete the cure. Sure enough, an enormous swelling of pus formed 20 days later in the boy’s right thigh. Gymnasios arrived and with a lancet cut open the cyst and drained the pus, three okas (nearly four kilograms) in amount³¹. He then cleansed the wound with soap, inserted plants, and bandaged tightly. Gymnasios predicted a full recovery in 10 days. When the boy did indeed regain his health—he rose from his bed 10 days later with ease—the parents went through the village of Maries praising the monk’s healing powers³². The villagers were incredulous and so flocked to the boy’s house. Amazed at the boy’s complete recovery from near death, they too spread the story, and so...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction The Γιατρoσόφιον in Byzantium and Post-Byzantium
• Part 1: Three Γιατρoσόφια
• Part 2: The Medical Recipes of Gymnasios Lauriōtis: Greek Text and Translation
• Part 3: A Comparative Study: Cross-References to the Γιατροσόφιον of Meletios and the Γιατροσόφιον of Anagnōstis
• General Index