THE FORTUNES OF DUNG BEETLES in the Middle Ages are relatively muted, and their main use appears to have been in remedies used by peasants. It was at the intersection of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that the beetles began to reappear in the work of naturalists interrogating the heady mix of religion, alchemical pursuits and traditional knowledge of the previous thousand years. This small band of individuals frequently oscillated between alchemy and observationbased knowledge – hardly exceptional, given that there never is a clear break between historical periods. The word alchemy itself was derived from the Arab word ‘alchimia’ and referred to magical and mystical traditions combined with investigation into the nature of the physical world; it encompassed the very fluid boundaries between those activities.

Despite official injunctions against magic, magical formulas were as prevalent in medicine as they were in alchemical formulas for transmuting base metals into gold. Such formulas appear in the materia medica (collections of information about the therapeutic properties of anything used for healing) of the Middle Ages, scattered among the more prosaic use of flora and, to a lesser extent, fauna. The actual recording of the use of animals and insects in the West can be traced back to Xenocrates of Aphrodisias, a first-century Greek whose work is only indirectly known via the writings of Galen (circa 130–210). Xenocrates's influence spread to the Arab world, and it is in the Syriac Book of Medicines that we find a very medieval fate for black scarabs – they were boiled in olive oil to cure earache. Dung itself (without any attendant beetles) featured far more widely in medical concoctions in the Middle Ages, often in the form of bizarre mixtures which worked best (if at all) as placebos.

In China, dung beetles appear in early materia medica, and are still used today by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine. These traditions began in rural areas, where peasants used whatever materials were at hand to effect cures. Some of these proved efficacious, and were recorded. Contemporary research in entomotherapy and compounds shows that different Chinese scarabs and their larvae have potentially useful antioxidant, antifungal, anti-viral and even anti-cancer properties, which probably explains why their use has continued for so long.