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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Sweet Feverfew
Description. The leaves of these feverfews are stringy and very narrow, but the flower indicates the species. The stalks are stiff, round, or striated, two feet high or more, clothed with smaller leaves, and pretty much branched towards the top, on which grow large flat umbels of flowers, made of several white petela, broader and shorter than those of eamomile, set about a yellow thrum. The root is thick at the head, having many fibres under it; the whole plant has a very strong' and, to most, an unpleasant smell. Place. They grow in hedges and lanes.
Time. The flowers are in June and July. The leaves and flowers are used. Government and virtues. The virtues of feverfew are very great: it is an herb particularly appropriated to the female sex, being of great service in all cold flatulent disorders of the womb, and hysteric affections; procuring the catamenia, and expelling the birth and secundines. The juice to the quantity of two ounces, given an hour before the fit, is good for all kinds of agues. It likewise destroys worms, provokes urine, and is good for the dropsy and jaundice. Corn and sea feverfew are variations that soil and situation naturally produce. The latter is most frequent in the neighbourhood of Chichester.