# Apples, syrup of

**Siroppo di pomi**

**Known today as.** A syrup of sweet apples.

Kind: Compound

## What did Canale use it for?

A preparative for phlegmatic patients (ch. 3). An apple also serves as a vessel for hellebore root (ch. 5).

## What does modern science say?

Culpeper called it “a fine cooling syrup” for hearts and stomachs overpressed with heat, safe in fevers because it “rather loosens than binds,” and good to quench thirst and stay hiccoughs.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **sugar**: 6–10 per cent of the fresh fruit
- **malic acid**: 

**Mechanism.** The juice of sweet-scented apples with bugloss, violet leaves, and rose water, boiled with sugar into a syrup; Grieve puts the dietetic value of apples in their malic and tartaric acids.

**Dose.** An ounce at a time, Culpeper says, in the morning or when needed.

**Standing.** A syrup of the London Dispensatory of 1653.

## What lore surrounds it?

Of the apple Folkard writes that “not only is the Apple mystical above all the fruits of the earth, but it is the supreme fruit.” The Scandinavian Iduna “religiously guarded in a box the Apples which the gods, when they felt old age approaching, had only to taste the juice of to become young again”; the Hesperides' apples were watched by a dragon; Atalanta lost her race stooping for three; and the apple inscribed Detur pulchriori “caused the ruin of Troy.” The Druids “were wont to cut their divining-rods from the Apple-tree,” Glastonbury was the “Apple Orchard,” and in Herefordshire, Devonshire and Cornwall the farmers still salute the trees on Christmas Eve, sprinkling them with cider and chanting, “Here's to thee, old Apple-tree, Whence thou may'st bud, and whence thou may'st blow; And whence thou may'st bear Apples enow.”

Grieve adds the cider country's health lore: “It is stated on medical authority that in countries where unsweetened cider is used as a common beverage, stone or calculus is unknown,” and among doctors in Normandy “not a single case of stone had been met with during forty years”; the old rhyme runs, “To eat an apple going to bed Will make the doctor beg his bread.” Rotten apples as a poultice “is an old Lincolnshire remedy for sore eyes,” and the superstition of Adam's apple “relates that a piece of the forbidden apple stuck in Adam's throat.”

## Sources

- Folkard, R. (1884). *Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics*, “Apple.” Project Gutenberg #44638.
- Grieve, M. (1931). *A Modern Herbal*, “Apple.” botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/a/apple044.html
- Culpeper, N. (1653). *Pharmacopoeia Londinensis*, “Syrup of apples.”

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*Apples, syrup of.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/apples-syrup-of

Historical description, not medical advice.