The Cure for Quinsy
Not all medieval medical practices were gruesome and painful for the patient, but they could still turn your stomach. Often physicians would have certain concoctions that they would create that would cure different ailments but sometimes there seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the concoction. Many times, there were different animal parts mixed with herbs and only sometimes were the animals parts cooked before being consumed.
In order to cure a quinsy, which is a severely infected throat, there was a rather interesting process. First the physician would need a fat cat. The poor beast would then be flayed. Next the cat would be cleaned and the guts drawn out. Next the grease of a hedgehog would be mixed with the fat of a bear. Into this mixture, the physician would add fenugreek, sage, gum of honeysuckle, and virgin wax.
Once mixed it would be crumbled into small pieces and then stuffed inside the now hollow cat in much the same way that you would stuff a goose. The cat would then be roasted and the grease drippings would be collected. It was these grease drippings that would then be given to the patient to be swallowed in order to cure the infected throat.
While the warm liquid might have been soothing to the patient it is unlikely that it would have done very much for the infected throat. There is little record about whether or not this specific procedure was very successful with patients. This was during a period where medicine was more of trial and error than an exact science. Physicians would learn the success of their cures by whether their patients got better with each new strange mixture.