CULPEPER'S COMPLETE HERBAL

SPIKENARD

Virtues. This is naturally an Indian plant, of a heating, drying faculty. It is good to provoke urine and ease pains of the stone in the reigns and kidnies, being drunk in cold water. It helps lothings, swellings or gnawings in the stomach, the yellow-jaundice, and such as are liver grown. It is a good ingredient in Mithridate and other antidotes against poison; to women with child it is forbidden to be taken inwardly. The oil is good to warm cold places, and to digest crude and raw humours it works powerfully on old cold griefs of the head and brain, stomach, liver, spleen, reins, and bladder. It purges the brain of rheum, being snuffed up the nostrils. Being infused certain days in wine and then distilled in a hot bath, the water is good inwardly and outwardly to be used for any coldness of the members. It comforts the brain, and helps cold pains of the head, and the shaking palsy. Two or three spoonfuls thereof being taken, help passions of the heart, swoonings, and the cholic: being drunk with wine, it is good against venomous bitings, and being made into troches with wine, it may be reserved for an eye medicine, which being aptly applied, expresses obnoxious humours thereof.