Backyard Medicine for All by Julie Bruton-Seal

Author:Julie Bruton-Seal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

Navelwort on a wall in Gloucestershire, June

As if to hint at the plant’s gradually reduced distribution, the first edition of Gerard’s Herball (1597) describes a navelwort plant growing on stonework in Westminster Abbey near to Chaucer’s grave. The second edition, by Thomas Johnson (1633), omits this reference, no doubt because the plant had gone.

Use navelwort for …

Navelwort was once accepted in ‘official’ medicine: in Culpeper’s English version (1653) of the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, the reference book for physicians and apothecaries, it was recommended for ‘kib’d heels [kibes were ulcerated chilblains], being bathed in it, and a leaf laid over the sore’.

It had been excluded from similar lists by the nineteenth century. Nonetheless it was once a significant herbal presence, and it could be turned to much more by today’s herbalists and first aiders.

It is the leaves that are used, for their watery, cooling sap – it is a close relative of the houseleek (Sempervivum tectorum), sometimes called the English Aloe vera, which has similar soothing uses.

The herbalist Julian Barker describes pulping navelwort leaves with a rolling pin and applying the mash to tired or sore eyes, to piles and chilblains. Using a compress or poultice will prolong the contact time.

Parkinson provides the most complete herbal perspective. The leaves, either in extracted juice or distilled water form, he tells us, are ‘very effectuall for all inflammations and unnatural heates’. He describes some of these: inwardly for ‘a fainting hot stomacke’ or hot liver, the bowels or womb; and outwardly, for pimples, redness, St Anthony’s fire (the skin condition erysipelas), and for sore kidneys.

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