“4. Burdock—arctenus lappa. Aperient, sudorific, and diuretic. Employed in venereal and Leprous disorders, scrofula, and scurvy. Fluid extract of lappa is exhibited even now to lepers. Dose, ½ to 1 dram.
“5. Monk’s rhubarb—rumex alpinus. Used for the same purposes as true rhubarb.
“6. Lily roots. This ancient remedy is in all the books to which the Franciscan Fathers of the Holy Land have access, and comes down from Pliny and Dioscorides. “Effugant lepras lilium radices.” (Plin.)
“7. Common wormwood—absinthium vulgare, artemisia.
“8. Daffodil—narcissus purpurens et narcissus croceus, called so from torpor. The oleum narcissenum et unguentum is found in all hospital books, and comes down from Pliny, 2, 19: “Narcissi duogenera medici usu recipiunt.” For Leprosy and cutaneous eruptions called mala scabies. This was what Canon Bethune calls les calmantes. Of this flower, I may say that eight out of ten monastic ruins in England abound with it, to such a degree that one cannot but conclude that it was set there of old, that it was cultivated for some purpose, and has reset and reproduced itself for centuries. Father Birch, S.J., confirms this in regard to Roche Abbey—de Rocca—an old Premonstratensian house, in Derbyshire, to which people come from afar to see the daffodils, which make of the purlieus of the abbey one great tapis jaune (sic.), but a carpet varied by every sort of English spring flowers.
“9. Scurvy grass—cochlearia officinalis—has long been considered, at Nicosia, Cyprus, and elsewhere, as the most effectual of all the anti-scorbutic plants. It grows in high latitudes, where scurvy is most obnoxious. Not only religious (sic.) and physicians, but sailors speak highly of it.
“10. The sedum acre—wall stone-crop. Used by nuns in Provence for ulcers and leprous eruptions. It is boiled in six pints of milk until reduced to three or four pints. For fungous flesh, it promotes discharge, and destroys both gangrenes and carbuncles. This is found in abundance on the cottage roofs about Melton Mowbray and Burton-Lazars.
“11. Celandine—chelidonium. Tintern Abbey, about Whitsuntide, is one large white tapestry of celandine. When I visited Tintern, I was struck by the lush clustering growth of this flower in 1885. An old legend says that it is so called because the swallow cures the eyes of its young of blindness by application of this herb. “Certainly,” says P. Xavier, Franciscan of the Holy Land, “it makes a good lotion for the eyes of the Leper, and is often used by us in France.”
“If I were to add here the history of the quinquina, or Jesuit’s bark—is it not told us that the lions drank of a well into which chincona had fallen, and thus suggested the useful Jesuits’ bark, or quinine?—it would take me into the seventeenth century, and be a little out of my track; but one word must be added on the girjan oil, the dipterocarpus of quite modern days, which seems to have great vogue in Barbadoes. This I do because it is the product of a magnificent tropical tree, and the hospitals did not forget in the treatment of Leprosy the use of common trees.”
Isolation is the only known effectual way of stamping out the disease, by its means was the great diminution in the numbers of victims affected here, by the end of the 14th century, and the almost total and complete extinction of it in the middle of the 16th century, 1560.