Comfrey, Vervain and Mints 211‘country herb-doctors’ as a remedy for both external and internal cancers.^45
The plant certainly had a reputation in book medicine as a cure for skin trou-
bles of various kinds, but a claim^46 that a name it has borne in Suffolk, ‘scald-
head’, is a reference to that may be taking things too far.
Ve r b e n a ceae
Verbena officinalis Linnaeus
vervain
Europe, western Asia, North Africa; introduced into North America,
Australasia
For some unknown reason the not very conspicuous and rather scarce Ve r -
bena officinalis was credited with exceptional magico-religious potency,
including as a divinatory, in parts of pre-Christian Europe. Belief in its pow-
ers seems to have survived into more recent times, especially strongly in Wales
and the Isle of Man, leaving behind a legacy at least in the latter of ostensibly
medicinal uses which are doubtless rooted in a reputation for countering
adverse influences of all kinds. Some authors^47 have identified it as the plant
known under the Manx name yn lus,‘the herb’, but others hold that that cor-
rectly belongs to motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca), the ‘gender twin’ in the
island ofV.o fficinalis and known there as ‘she-vervain’.^48
There is nevertheless a sound phytochemical basis for some of the heal-
ing virtues attributed to vervain, for it contains a bitter principle, verbenaline,
which has an action resembling that of quinine. For that reason the plant has
been valued in the Isle of Man^49 for allaying fevers and in Gloucestershire^50
drunk as a strengthening tonic. A further internal use, also reported from
Gloucestershire, has been as a vermifuge.^51 Probably more often, though,
application has been external. ‘Many country people’, wrote John Quincy in
1718, ‘pretend to get great feats with it in agues, by applying it to the wrist in
the form of a cataplasm [i.e. plaster]; and also to cure gouty pains and
swellings with it, used in the same manner.’^52 More recent such records are for
wounds in Sussex,^53 sunburn in Norfolk^54 and as an eye lotion in Hereford-
shire.^55 Reportedly, the plant has also been used widely in England for sores.^56
Ireland has produced the only certain mention (and that an unlocalised
one^57 ) of the wearing in a bag around the body of some portion of this plant
as a remedy for scrofula, for which it was at one time held in particularly high
repute; this may well have been the bag, though, that children were given to
wear in Sussex to cure them of some unidentified sickness.^58 As vervain has