Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Azalea
Description. Trailing Azalea has a long spreading root, divided into many parts, and furnished with numerous fibres spreading every way in the ground. The stalks are woody and covered with a dark coloured rind, tough, thin, and four or five inches long, sometimes much more. The leaves are very numerous and very small: they are of a dark green, and they stand in pairs; oblong, slender, and sharp-pointed. The flowers grow at the top of the branches, two, three, or more together; they are of a beautiful red. Place. It is usually found in woods and black exposures. Time. It flowers in July.
Government and virtues. It is a plant of Mercury> and has a pleasing aromatic smell, resembling that of lemous, and is cordial and strengthening. It comforts the head and stomach, removes palpitations of the heart, helps the vertigo, or giddiness and swimmings in the head, and is greatly extolled by many as a specific in nervous and hypochondrical disorders.