MEDICINAL PLANTS in Folk Tradition

(Darren Dugan) #1

ailment in ‘some parts of England’.^40 In the Highlands they have served as
the source of a snuff taken to alleviate catarrh.^41 The only record traced of the
use of the fronds is from Herefordshire, where they had to be bearing spores
if they were to be effective for whooping cough.^42


DENNSTAEDTIACEAE


Pteridium aquilinum (Linnaeus) Kuhn
bracken
cosmopolitan except temperate South America
(Identity as a folk herb questionable) Though ‘fern’ more often than not
means Pteridium aquilinum when used by non-botanists, when that word is
met with in folk medicine it apparently refers to other species in most if not
all cases. Even John Lightfoot’s eighteenth-century report, cited by many later
authors, that the country people in Scotland reckoned a bed of ‘bracken’ a
sovereign remedy for rickets in children^43 has to be treated with reserve, for
it is suspicious in that the ability to cure rickets was attributed to Osmunda
regalis (royal fern) in Ireland. Though allegedly used in Classical medicine
and recommended in herbals,^44 P. aquilinum is poisonous to humans as well
as farm animals, often containing cyanide and also now known to be car-
cinogenic.


ASPLENIACEAE


Phyllitis scolopendrium (Linnaeus) Newman
Asplenium scolopendrium Linnaeus
hart’s-tongue; fox-tongue, cow’s-tongue (Ireland)
Europe, Macaronesia, west-central Asia, Japan, North America
As with Polypodium vulgare and Osmunda regalis,the greater prevalence of
Phyllitis scolopendrium in the west of the British Isles explains why the records
of its use are predominantly from there. In those from England and Scot-
land, ailments treated by it have been diverse: in Devon^45 and the Hebrides^46
colds and pulmonary congestion, in Wiltshire warts^47 and in the Isle of Wight
to cool erysipetaloid eruptions on the legs.^48 The last may perhaps have
involved the same plaster as James Robertson found being applied in Ross-
shire in 1767 ‘to extract an animalcule which nestling in their legs or other
places produces exquisite pain’.^49
In Ireland, in sharp contrast, the plant has enjoyed a very wide use for one
quite different purpose: as an ointment made from the boiled fronds for


60 Polypodium vulgare

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