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.
Fumitory
Description. A pretty wild plant, with blueish divided leaves, and spikes of little purple flowers: it grows ten inches high. The stalk is round, striated, of a pale green, thick enough, but not very firm or perfectly erect. The leaves are large, but they are divided into a vast number of little parts, which are blunt and rounded at the ends; their colour is a faint green. The flowers are small and purple; they have a heel behind, and a number of them stand together in a kind of spike. The whole plant has little taste. Place. It is common in our corn-fields in June and July. Virtues. The juice expressed from this plant is excellent against the scurvy. It opens obstructions of the viscera, and is good against the jaundice, and all other diseases arising from obstructions.