10 Medieval Survival Tricks Scientists Once Thought Were Dumb but Now Call Genius

10 Medieval Survival Tricks Scientists Once Thought Were Dumb but Now Call Genius Number ten: Battlefield Urine Therapy. Picture yourself on a battlefield in fourteenth-century France. The noise has faded. The mud is soaked through your boots, and somewhere below your ribs there is a wound that has been getting worse for three days. The flesh around it has gone soft and dark, and the smell tells you what your body already knows. The man kneeling beside you is not a physician. He is a fellow soldier, a veteran of a dozen campaigns, and what he is pressing against the infected tissue is not a poultice, not a herb, not a prayer cloth.