mander speedwell (Ve ronica chamaedrys), a known jaundice herb (including
in that county.)
Pedicularis palustris Linnaeus
marsh lousewort, red rattle
northern and central Europe, Caucasus, North America
In the second half of the eighteenth century the Rev. Dr John Walker visited
Jura in the course of a fact-finding survey of the Hebrides. A remarkable
number of its inhabitants, he found, were crippled for life by a disease
allegedly caused by a reddish worm, about an inch in length, which lodged
under the skin of the knees or the ankles, causing intense pain. The affliction
was known in Gaelic as the fillan (under which name cases were recorded
from elsewhere in the Hebrides and western Highlands by other early
authors). The only known cure as far as he could ascertain was derived from
the root of a local plant: pounded and mixed with the marrow of beef bones
or goat tallow, this was applied on a hot poultice to the part affected. An expe-
rienced botanist who became professor of natural history at Edinburgh Uni-
versity, Walker identified the plant as Pedicularis palustris,^240 which is now
known to contain a glycoside poisonous to insects. Thomas Pennant, who
had had a session with Walker three years before his second Scottish tour in
1772, asked further about the worm when he, too, visited Jura. Pennant was
able to add that it was ‘small as a thread’, caused redness and moved quickly
from one part of the body to another; the only cure mentioned to him, how-
ever, was a poultice of cheese and honey.^241
The only other record traced of the plant’s use in the British Isles is also
from the Highlands, where its flowers are said to have been used to procure
a cosmetic.^242
Orobanchaceae
Lathraea squamaria Linnaeus
toothwort
Europe,western Asia
According to John Gerard, country women in England in his day called Lath-
raea squamaria ‘lungwort’ and used it against ‘the cough’ (presumably pul-
monary tuberculosis) and other lung troubles.^243 No other record has been
traced of the plant’s presence in folk medicine in either Britain or Ireland.
262 Euphrasia officinalis