indigestion.^96 This can only have been a comparatively late use and may well
have come from the written tradition.
Salix Linnaeus
willow, sallow, sallies
almost worldwide except Australasia and East Indies
Salix repens Linnaeus
Europe, western and central Asia
Because of a common failure by druggists no less than folklore collectors to
distinguish between the species—let alone the hybrids—in the admittedly
taxonomically difficult genus Salix,it is necessary for the most part to discuss
these plants here only in a collective sense. Most if not all the taxa found wild
in the British Isles, however, are probably similar phytochemically, with bark
rich in tannin as well as in the all-important compound salicin.
The story is often repeated of the accidental discovery c. 1757 by a parson
in the north of Oxfordshire, the Rev. Edward Stone, of the powerfully astrin-
gent property of the bark of white willow (Salix alba Linnaeus), which, he
found, made it highly effective against ‘agues’ (including malaria) and other
fevers.^97 Stone has consequently received the credit, and rightly, for first alert-
ing the medical profession to this property and for thus starting science on
the road which eventually led to the isolation of salicin and its clinical appli-
cation, most notably in the form of aspirin, in the nineteenth century. How-
ever, those who relate the story are at fault in not pointing out to their read-
ers that Stone had been plentifully anticipated in folk medicine in parts of the
world as far apart as Burma (Myanmar), Africa and North America as well as
Europe at least as early as biblical times. Before learned medicine adopted its
disdainful attitude to folk tradition, knowledge of the effectiveness of wil-
low ‘juice’ in allaying fevers was leaking up from that basic substratum into
the late medieval literature and the syncretistic repertory of the physicians of
Myddvai in south-western Wales.
The apparently age-old practice in folk medicine of drinking the bitter
infusion known as willow-bark tea as a means of relieving fever, surviving
into relatively recent years in Sussex^98 and the Fens of East Anglia,^99 has been
attributed to a naive theory that because these trees grow in damp places they
must be good for ailments caused by damp conditions. That explanation,
however, must surely be fanciful in view of the large number of other plants
characteristic of damp habitats which might equally well have been chosen
for the purposes in question. There may be significance in the fact that the
St John’s-worts to Primulas 115