previous next

CHAP. 77.—DARNEL: FIVE REMEDIES.

Even more than this—the very plants which are the bane of the corn-field are not without their medicinal uses. Darnel1 has received from Virgil2 the epithet of "unhappy;" and yet, ground and boiled with vinegar, it is used as an application for the cure of impetigo, which is the more speedily effected the oftener the application is renewed. It is employed, also, with oxymel, for the cure of gout and other painful diseases. The following is the mode of treatment: for one sextarius of vinegar, two ounces of honey is the right proportion; three sextarii having been thus prepared, two sextarii of darnel meal are boiled down in it to a proper consistency, the mixture being applied warm to the part affected. This meal, too, is used for the extraction of splinters of broken bones.

1 See B. xviii. c. 44. Darnel acts upon the brain to such an extent as to produce symptoms like those of drunkenness; to which property it is indebted for its French name of ivraie. It is no longer used in medicine.

2 Georg. i. 153; "Infelix lolium, et steriles dominantur avenæ."

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: