previous next

CHAP. 91.—SISYMBRIUM OR THYMBRÆUM: TWENTY-THREE REMEDIES.

Wild1 sisymbrium, by some persons called "thymbræum." does not grow beyond a foot in height. The kind2 which grows in watery places, is similar to nasturtium, and they3 are both of them efficacious for the stings of certain insects, such as hornets and the like. That which grows in dry localities is odoriferous, and is employed4 for wreaths: the leaf of it is narrower than in the other kind. They both of them alleviate head-ache, and defluxions of the eyes, Philinus says. Some persons, however, employ bread in addition; while others, again, use a decoction of the plant by itself in wine It is a cure, also, for epinyctis, and removes spots on the face in females, by the end of four days; for which purpose, it is applied at night and taken off in the day-time. It arrests vomiting, hiccup, gripings, and fluxes of the stomach, whether taken with the food, or the juice extracted and given in drink.

This plant, however, should never be eaten by pregnant women, except in cases where the fœtus is dead, for the very application of it is sufficient to produce abortion. Taken with wine, it is diuretic, and the wild variety expels calculi even. For persons necessitated to sit up awake, an infusion of it in vinegar is applied as a liniment to the head.

1 The Sisymbrion menta of Gerard; the Menta hirsuta of Decandolle, prickly mint. Sprengel, however, takes it to be the Menta silvestris of modern Botany.

2 The Sisymbrion nasturtium of Linnæus.

3 Apparently the Sisymbriom just mentioned, and the Nasturtium.

4 Ovid, Fasti, B. iv. l. 869, speaks of Sisymbrium as being esteemed by the Roman ladies for its agreeable smell.

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 (3 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (1):
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (2):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: