Legumes, Spurges and Geraniums 167superstition probably gave birth to its medical fame.’^87 So wrote the otherwise
enlightened William Withering, dismissively. Attitudes now, however, are
very different, and mistletoe is taken increasingly seriously by present-day
medical science as an important source of therapeutic chemicals, both actual
and potential. Even those Druidical superstitions hardly deserved Wither-
ing’s contempt, for Viscum was one of three herbs mentioned by Pliny the
Elder in his Natural History as held in high esteem by the contemporary
Gauls—and, as it was a plant well known to the Romans, there can hardly be
doubt about its identity. Pliny says the Druids believed it an antidote for all
poisons and called it ‘all heal’, and that has survived as one of its vernacular
names in both Wales and Scotland.
Since ancient times it has been known that the plant produces a substance
which has a relaxing effect on the nervous system. That is the property that
finds principal reflection in the folk records (naturally concentrated in the
southern half of England, the only part of the British Isles in which mistletoe
occurs in any quantity). Employment in that connection ranges from con-
trolling the involuntary muscle contractions characteristic of chorea (‘St
Vitus’ dance’) in Wiltshire,^88 Hampshire,^89 Sussex,^90 Gloucestershire^91 and
Lincolnshire^92 and those of epilepsy in Suffolk,^93 Herefordshire^94 and Lin-
colnshire,^95 to calming hysteria in Herefordshire^96 and heart palpitation in
Inverness-shire.^97 Because of the control the plant is believed to exert over
blood pressure as well, there is also a contemporary Essex record of eating a
leaf daily to guard against a stroke.^98
A secondary use of mistletoe in the more distant past has been for fevers,
a practice surviving into the eighteenth century in Moray.^99 Relics of that
presumably are its deployment against measles (to bring out the spots) in
Somerset^100 and whooping cough in Norfolk.^101
In Ireland the plant has enjoyed a reputation in Cavan^102 and Meath^103 for
soothing the nerves in general, and in Limerick^104 and Cork^105 for palliating
epilepsy and hysteria specifically.
Celastraceae
Euonymus europaeus Linnaeus
spindle
Europe, western Asia; introduced into New Zealand
One of the vernacular names forEuonymus europaeus,‘louseberries’, recorded
from Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Cumbria, is a relic of the once wide-
spread decoction of the leaves or bark or powder employed against head lice