Important: Safety Warning
This page describes preparations historically taken to end pregnancy or "bring on the menses." These substances do not work as claimed and are seriously toxic; their use has caused poisoning and death.
In addition, 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.
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Mountain Poley
Description. This polium grows about a foot high, much branched, with squarish woolly stalks, having two small white woolly leaves at a joint, not above half an inch long, and scarce half so broad, blunt pointed and indented about the edges towards their end. The flowers grow at the end of the branches in roundish, woolly, thick spikes, small, and of a white colour, labiated, but having no galea, being set in white, hoary, five-pointed calices; both leaves and flowers have a pleasant aromatic scent.
Place. It grows in Italy, and the southern parts of France, but bears the cold of our winters, if care be taken to secure it from the severity of the frost in a green-house.
Time. It flowers in July and August.
Government and virtues. Mountain poley is under the dominion of Venus. It is opening and attenuating, good for obstructions of the liver and spleen; it is also good in dropsical cases, and the jaundice; it provokes urine and the menses, and is serviceable in cases of bites of venomous creatures. It is also an ingredient in the theriaca andromachi. Outwardly applied, it is emollient, ripening and dissolving, good for hard tumours and swellings, and is frequently put into plaisters and ointments for those purposes.