12/11/2025
📜🔬 A 1,000-year-old onion-and-garlic remedy has just outperformed some of today’s strongest antibiotics in the lab — and scientists are stunned.
Researchers revisiting a medieval recipe known as Bald’s eye salve discovered that this ancient mixture can wipe out antibiotic-resistant bacteria far more effectively than expected. The remedy, first recorded in the Anglo-Saxon medical text Bald’s Leechbook, blends garlic, onion, wine, and extracts from cow stomach. When a team from the University of Nottingham recreated it using the original preparation steps, they found something remarkable: the complete mixture destroyed up to 90% of MRSA, one of the world’s most dangerous superbugs.
Even more surprising is that the ingredients showed no significant antibacterial power on their own. Only when combined exactly as the medieval recipe instructed did the treatment become potent enough to outperform modern antibiotics — including against biofilms, dense bacterial communities that are notoriously difficult to eliminate.
Scientists are now studying how this ancient formula works, and why it succeeds where many current drugs fail. As antibiotic resistance continues to rise globally — a threat projected to cause hundreds of millions of deaths by mid-century — discoveries like this offer a rare and hopeful lead in the search for new treatments.
Source: University of Nottingham research (published in mBio and related institutional reports)
What other ancient remedies do you think might hold scientific secrets? Does this discovery change how you view historical medical texts?
For educational purposes. This content is based on publicly available scientific research.