previous next

CHAP. 74.—TWENTY-ONE REMEDIES DERIVED FROM THE LILY.

The roots of the lily1 ennoble that flower in manifold ways by their utility in a medicinal point of view. Taken in wine, they are good for the stings of serpents, and in cases of poisoning by fungi. For corns on the feet, they are applied boiled in wine, not being taken off before the end of three days. A decoction of them with grease or oil, has the effect of making the hair grow again upon burns. Taken with honied wine, they carry off corrupt blood by stool; they are good, also, for the spleen and for hernia, and act as an emmenagogue. Boiled in wine and applied with honey, they are curative of wounds of the sinews. They are good, too, for lichens, leprous sores, and scurf upon the face, and they efface wrinkles of the body.

The petals of the lily are boiled in vinegar, and applied, in combination with polium,2 to wounds; if it should happen, however, to be a wound of the testes, it is the best plan to apply the other ingredients with henbane and wheat-meal. Lily-seed is applied in cases of erysipelas, and the flowers and leaves are used as a cataplasm for inveterate ulcers. The juice which is extracted from the flower is called "honey"3 by some persons, and "syrium" by others; it is employed as an emollient for the uterus, and is also used for the purpose of promoting perspirations, and for bringing suppurations to a head.

1 See c. 11 of this book. The bulbs of the lily contain a mucilage, and roasted or boiled the are sometimes employed, Fée says, to bring inflammations to a head. Employed internally, he thinks that they would be of no use whatever, and there is nothing in their composition, he says, which would induce one to think that they might be employed to advan- tage in most of the cases mentioned by Pliny.

2 Or "Poley." See c. 21 of this Book.

3 "Mel."

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 (4 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: