CULPEPER'S COMPLETE HERBAL

MEADOW SAFFRON

Description. This has a large roundish root, and the leaves are numerous, long, and, when fully expanded, very broad; they naturally appear at a different time from the flower; and if any chance to rise with it, they are narrower. The flower rises out of the ground without any stalk, its own tubular base serving for that purpose; it is very large, and of a pale, but elegant purple. The segments are naturally six, but sometimes they are found double that number; and sometimes, instead of an uniform purple, the flower is streaked with white, or is white throughout.

Place. It is commonly found in meadows.

Time. It blossoms in September.

Government and virtues. It is under Saturn. Indirectly used, this root is poisonous; two drachms of it killed a large dog, after putting him to great torment for twelve or fourteen hours; it operated violently by vomit, stook and urine. A single grain only being swallowed by a person in health, by way of experiment, produced heat in the stomach, and soon after flushing heats in varoius parts of the body, with frequent shiverings, which were followed by colocy pains, after wihich an itching in the loins and urinary passages was perceived, and presently after came on a continual inclination to make water, with a tremour, pain in the head, great thirst, a very quick pulse, and other disagreeable symptoms.

Notwithstanding these effects, it is, when properly prepared, a safe, but powerful medicine; the best way of doing this is to make it into a kind of syrup, dy digesting an ounce of the fresh roots, sliced thin, in a pin of white-wine vinegar, over a gentle fire, for the space of forty-eight hours, and then mixing two pounds of honey with the strined liquor, and letting it boil gently afterwards till it comes to a proper consistence.

The syrup is agreeable acid, gently vellicates or bites the tongue, is moderately stringent, and excellent for cleansing the tongue from mucus. In an increased dose it vomits, and sometimes purges, but its most common operation is by urine, for which it is a remarkable powerful medicine. The dose at first should be but small, half a tea-spoonful twice or three times a day is enough to begin with, and the quantity may afterwards be gradually increased, as the stomach will bear it, or the case may require. It has been given with the most astonishing success in dropsies and tertian agues; and it frequently succeeds as an expctorant, when all other means fail.