and near-absence from the British ones leads one to suspect that, except in the
case of a veterinary use mentioned by John Parkinson in 1640,^437 it may have
been wholly borrowed from the learned tradition—and that despite the fact
that Dutch peasants are known to have taken a preparation of the plant as an
alterative and antiscorbutic,^438 and Belgian ones as a cure for jaundice.^439
John Lightfoot described it as a rough medicine sometimes favoured by ‘the
lower classes of people’ (for jaundice and dropsy)^440 but left it unclear
whether that statement was referring to Britain. More persuasively, a poultice
of the leaves saved from amputation the severely poisoned arm of a Cornish
fisherman in the 1930s, a remedy later copied with claimed success by a Mid-
dlesex acquaintance of his to extract pus from boils.^441 Because that was a
function of the plant popularised by the influential Dutch physician Her-
man Boerhaave, however, even in that case an element of doubt must attach
to the folk credentials of the remedy.
Notes
Daisies 313- IFC S 485: 191
- Deane & Shaw
- Collyns
- Johnston 1853, 129
- McNeill
- Moore 1898
- Davies1938, 167
- Jobson 1967, 57
- Vickery MSS
- Carmichael, ii, 349
- Johnston 1853, 129
- Quincy, 156
- Moore 1898
- Quelch, 50
- Johnson 1862
- IFC S 710: 43
- McClafferty
- IFC S 657: 248
- McGlinchey, 86
- IFC S 157: 463
- Wilde, 34
- Moloney
- IFC S 657: 216
- IFC S 710: 49
- IFC S 1043: 265
- Moore MS
- IFC S 657: 248
- IFC S 524: 119
- IFC S 657: 248
- IFC S 132: 97; 137: 135
- Egan
- IFC S 657: 248
- IFC S 914: 555
- Maloney
- Ó hEithir MS
- IFC S 672: 205, 206, 210, 258, 259;
673: 155 - Farrelly MS
- Maloney
- Vickery MSS
- IFC S 786: 116
- IFC S 483: 300
- IFC S 780: 243
- Beith
- A. Allen, 185
- Hatfield, 28
- Gerard, 166
- Hatfield, 27
- Egan
- Maloney