Onions

Allium cepa

HRB-0215Entry “ONIONS” in the 1850 textIn Culpeper’s 1652 first edition

Open in the Concordance

Old claims, quoted verbatim: not medical advice. A warning sits above the claims and never hides them; no warning does not mean safe, only that no source here has flagged the plant.

Historical correspondence. Ruled by Mars, by Culpeper. A traditional astrological assignment, kept apart from the modern evidence; it is not a finding.

Culpeper’s claims about it: 9, under 9 headings

  1. yet they do somewhat provoke appetite, increase thirst, ease the belly and bowels, provoke women’s courses, help the biting of a mad dog, and of other venomous creatures, to be used with honey and rue, increase sperm, especially the seed of them.
    QUO-000091Papers and the EMA’s verdict, in the Concordance
  2. yet they do somewhat provoke appetite, increase thirst, ease the belly and bowels, provoke women’s courses, help the biting of a mad dog, and of other venomous creatures, to be used with honey and rue, increase sperm, especially the seed of them.
    QUO-000091Papers and the EMA’s verdict, in the Concordance
  3. CoughsCLM-000586
    Being roasted under the embers, and eaten with honey or sugar and oil, they much conduce to help an inveterate cough, and expectorate the cough phlegm.
    QUO-000489Papers and the EMA’s verdict, in the Concordance
  4. ImposthumesCLM-000868
    Applied also with figs beaten together, helps to ripen and break imposthumes, and other sores.
    QUO-000670Papers and the EMA’s verdict, in the Concordance
  5. The juice being snuffed up into the nostrils, purges the head, and helps the lethargy, (yet the often eating them is said to procure pains in the head.) It hath been held by divers country people a great preservative against infection, to eat Onions fasting with bread and salt:
    QUO-000746Papers and the EMA’s verdict, in the Concordance
  6. PilesCLM-001368
    They are a remedy against a surfeit of mushrooms, being baked under the embers and taken, and being boiled and applied very warm, help the piles.
    QUO-000926Papers and the EMA’s verdict, in the Concordance
  7. SurfeitsCLM-001763
    They are a remedy against a surfeit of mushrooms, being baked under the embers and taken, and being boiled and applied very warm, help the piles.
    QUO-000926Papers and the EMA’s verdict, in the Concordance
  8. UlcersCLM-001979
    As also to make a great Onion hollow, filling the place with good treacle, and after to roast it well under the embers, which, after taking away the outermost skin thereof, being beaten together, is a sovereign salve for either plague or sore, or any other putrefied ulcer.
    QUO-001248Papers and the EMA’s verdict, in the Concordance
  9. WormsCLM-002123
    They also kill worms in children if they drink the water fasting wherein they have been steeped all night.
    QUO-001331Papers and the EMA’s verdict, in the Concordance

Source

Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal, a new edition (London: Thomas Kelly, 1850). Project Gutenberg eBook #49513. SRC-CUL-1850

Quotations are verbatim from the 1850 text, line breaks joined. Modern research and the European regulator’s verdict on each claim are on the Concordance page, kept apart from this historical record.