Burns - treatment, complications and disabilities

That sounds like pure torture!

 

Was it written by Dr. Lucifer von Sadist?
Cause that is just bloody insane and cruel.

 

Excuse my for the misunderstanding then. But in terms of my sources: The scholarly article by Seiter, David published in Nursing Vol 42(1) titled Maggots, honey and...sildenafil talks about alternative treatement for honey. I looked for alternative treatement for burns and the historicity of it when I first saw this article. There is also Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) which wrote of contemporary life and was a prolific poet, thinker and writer. Some of his work touches upon medicine and treatement of burns - including a reference to honey.

In terms of why it could be bad to use honey I will quote from Seiter (2012):

This implies that honey has impurities or other such unwanted artifacts and may need to be properly prepared prior to use.

If I may add, sources upon the treatement of burns in medieval times is relatively rare and is mostly guesswork - along with most of history. I am telling what I know based from my own readings and my own research into medieval treatement of wounds (though I did not look specifically at burns). A few writers, particularly in roman or pre-roman times write about this. But there is few sources after this point. Mostly due to a large decrease in literacy rate and the focus of books to originally be more about religion and theology. However, they are still 'out there' if you wish to find then. Other writers that talk about this includes a numerous romana nd philosophers, perhaps the most important of which is Hippocrates.

But in regards to honey - it was a known anti-bacterial at the time (or their equivalent of) and was used often in many different wounds - burns or otherwise. It terms of why it was bad I am afraid I can't help you other than stating the obvious: Honey is not always perfect and may introduce elements to a wound you don't want to introduce like foreign objects or insects that got caught in the honey (edit: and may overall worsen the injury due to the introduction of foreign material(s))

As for the linen bandages, that comes right out of ancient egypt's finds. Mummies were wrapped in linen. The greeks and romans similarly used linen, though more sporadically, in their medicine.

 

For any burn, the first step is always to soak in cold water for 30 seconds or more. That's probably not what they did back then, but they could've.

 

It would be nice irony for one character to want to get the person into cold water and for another character to negate it in favor of something we now know to be not helpful, and then for the cold water advocate to be insistent and win the argument.