Legumes, Spurges and Geraniums 171stock for that purpose and its use for human beings was confined to practi-
cal joking: one man in Galway who was dosed with it ‘ran up and down the
street like a madman, and swelled so big that his friends had to bind him
round with hay-ropes lest he shall burst.’^124
Horseplay also found a use for Euphorbia helioscopia in the Isle of Man,^125
but in that case arising out of a different property of the juice: the ability to
make the head of the penis swell. As an aid to sexual excitement this was suf-
ficiently well known to have given rise to a name for the plant in Manx
descriptive of the effect, and that ‘Saturday-night-pepper’ was one of the
names borne by spurge in Wiltshire^126 suggests that it may have had this role
in many other areas as well.
Like the Irish, the Manx also knew of the purgative power of spurges^127 ;
another of the plants’ names in their language identified it as a herb for uri-
nary purposes, too.^128 Contrariwise, in at least one part of Ireland Euphorbia
hyberna has enjoyed a reputation as an infallible cure for diarrhoea.^129 In
north-eastern Scotland E. helioscopia was employed against ringworm,^130
while in Lincolnshire^131 and (perhaps) Kent^132 the plant served to poultice
adder bites and other venomous wounds. More unexpected is the infusion
made from it in Northumberland and drunk twice daily to relieve the pain of
rheumatism.^133
Rhamnaceae
Rhamnus cathartica Linnaeus
buckthorn
Europe, western Asia, north-western Africa; introduced into
North America
Though Rhamnus cathartica was once a standard purge for constipation,
especially in children, even the supposedly mild dose of twenty berries acted
so violently and produced such intensive griping pain that from the eigh-
teenth century onwards, physicians advised against its use. Nevertheless, the
berries were still collected in the Chilterns for druggists as late as the 1880s.^134
Though it was plentiful and accessible enough to have formed part of the
folklore repertory, the virtual absence of records from the folk literature sug-
gests that its use was either derived from learned medicine or abandoned so
early that memory of it had become forgotten—at any rate as a human rem-
edy: it is on record as one for cattle in Ireland.