Oxymel (, ) is a mixture of
honey
Honey is a sweet and viscous substance made by several bees, the best-known of which are honey bees. Honey is made and stored to nourish bee colonies. Bees produce honey by gathering and then refining the sugary secretions of plants (primar ...
and
vinegar
Vinegar is an aqueous solution of acetic acid and trace compounds that may include flavorings. Vinegar typically contains 5–8% acetic acid by volume. Usually, the acetic acid is produced by a double fermentation, converting simple sugars to et ...
, used as a medicine. According to Scientific American, recently the mixture has been used successfully in a biofilm for topical uses on wounds where bacteria has become resistant to antibiotics, both ingredients having been used historicaly as antiseptics, but the combination was reported as killing as much as 1,000 times more bacteria than vinegar alone and as much as 100,000 times more than honey alone in biofilms.
Its name is often found in Renaissance (and later)
pharmacopoeia
A pharmacopoeia, pharmacopeia, or pharmacopoea (from the obsolete typography ''pharmacopœia'', meaning "drug-making"), in its modern technical sense, is a book containing directions for the identification of compound medicines, and published by ...
e in
Late Latin
Late Latin ( la, Latinitas serior) is the scholarly name for the form of Literary Latin of late antiquity.Roberts (1996), p. 537. English dictionary definitions of Late Latin date this period from the , and continuing into the 7th century in t ...
form as either a
countable or
uncountable noun
In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elemen ...
. As a countable noun, it is spelled variously as (singular) oxymellus and oxymellis, and
plural oxymeli and oxymelli.
Etymology and recipe
Cato the Elder
Marcus Porcius Cato (; 234–149 BC), also known as Cato the Censor ( la, Censorius), the Elder and the Wise, was a Roman soldier, senator, and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization. He was the first to write histo ...
describes it thus:
: A wine made from vinegar and honey, which in Greece was called ''oxymel'', (, hence
atin"oxymel"). It is made thus. Ten libras of honey with five heminas of vinegar, which will be subsumed.
Themison confused oxymel and
hydromel
Mead () is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey mixed with water, and sometimes with added ingredients such as fruits, spices, grains, or hops. The alcoholic content ranges from about 3.5% ABV to more than 20%. The defining charact ...
. But hydromel wine is made from ''water'' and honey, hence the name. Its name recalls the creation of
omphacomel, which is made from semi-dry
.e. sharpgrapes and sweet honey, hence the name, . Hence what is called
omphalic oil"">omphalic_oil.html" ;"title="omphalic oil">omphalic oil" from sour olives which in Greek is called (?), and omphacium from grapes, commonly called Malbec">agreste
The agreste (, "countryside") is a narrow zone of Brazil in the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe and Bahia between the coastal forest ''zona da mata'' and the semiarid ''sertão''. The agreste fades out after ...
In the 1593 work ''Enchiridion chirurgicum'', oxymel was recommended as part of a treatment for ophthalmia.
Because Latin was (and is) still used widely in medical prescriptions, it was still known by this name in Victorian times:
: Prescription: Lead acetate one grain (unit), grain. Dissolve in
, ten minims. To be taken every four to six hours.