Portulaca oleracea
HRB-0235Entry “PURSLAIN” in the 1850 textIn Culpeper’s 1652 first edition
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 Moon, by Culpeper. A traditional astrological assignment, kept apart from the modern evidence; it is not a finding.
What it does, in Culpeper: Stops vomiting
It is good to cool any heat in the liver, blood, reins, and stomach, and in hot agues nothing better:
It is good to cool any heat in the liver, blood, reins, and stomach, and in hot agues nothing better:
and applied to the eyes, takes away the redness and inflammation in them, and those other parts where pushes, wheals, pimples, St. Anthony’s fire and the like, break forth;
It is good to cool any heat in the liver, blood, reins, and stomach, and in hot agues nothing better:
The juice also is singularly good in the inflammations and ulcers in the secret parts of man or woman, as also the bowels and hæmorrhoids, when they are ulcerous, or excoriations in them.
as also to stay vomitings, and taken with some sugar or honey, helps an old and dry cough, shortness of breath, and the phthisick, and stays immoderate thirst.
Applied to the gout it eases pains thereof, and helps the hardness of the sinews, if it come not of the cramp, or a cold cause.
The juice also is singularly good in the inflammations and ulcers in the secret parts of man or woman, as also the bowels and hæmorrhoids, when they are ulcerous, or excoriations in them.
It is good to cool any heat in the liver, blood, reins, and stomach, and in hot agues nothing better:
as also to stay vomitings, and taken with some sugar or honey, helps an old and dry cough, shortness of breath, and the phthisick, and stays immoderate thirst.
It stays hot and choleric fluxes of the belly, women’s courses, the whites, and gonorrhæa, or running of the reins, the distillation from the head, and pains therein proceeding from heat, want of sleep, or the frenzy.
The juice is used with oil of roses for the same causes, or for blasting by lightning, and burnings by gunpowder, or for women’s sore breasts, and to allay the heat in all other sores or hurts;
It is good to cool any heat in the liver, blood, reins, and stomach, and in hot agues nothing better:
The juice also is singularly good in the inflammations and ulcers in the secret parts of man or woman, as also the bowels and hæmorrhoids, when they are ulcerous, or excoriations in them.
as also to stay vomitings, and taken with some sugar or honey, helps an old and dry cough, shortness of breath, and the phthisick, and stays immoderate thirst.
The seed bruised and boiled in wine, and given to children, expels the worms.
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.