Butcher’s broom

Butcher’s broom: what was it used for?

A diuretic and opener for the old physicians. Culpeper calls it “a plant of Mars, being of a gallant cleansing and opening quality”: the root boiled in wine to open obstructions, provoke urine, and expel gravel and the stone, and with honey to clear the chest of phlegm; the decoction drunk, with a poultice of berries and leaves, to knit broken bones. His usual way was to boil the root with parsley, fennel, and smallage in white wine, “yet I hope you have wit enough to give the strongest decoction to the strongest bodies.” Grieve still found it used for jaundice and gravel.

Butcher’s broom: what does modern science say?

The European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee accepts the rhizome as a traditional herbal medicine, “exclusively based upon long-standing use,” for two purposes: to relieve discomfort and heaviness of the legs from minor disorders of the veins, and to relieve the itching and burning of haemorrhoids once a doctor has excluded anything serious (monograph of 2018). Its assessment report traces the plant’s chemistry to steroidal saponins first isolated from the rhizome in the middle of the twentieth century, built on ruscogenin and neoruscogenin, more concentrated below ground than above.

Butcher’s broom: what did the older authorities say?

Dioscorides

His myrsine agria, the wild myrtle, has a leaf like myrtle but broader and spear-pointed, a round fruit borne in the middle of the leaf and red when ripe, and willow-like branches many from one root. Leaves and berries in wine, he writes, induce urine, bring on the menses, and break stones in the bladder, and cure jaundice and headache; the young shoots are eaten like asparagus, though bitter. The chapter ends: “the Romans, ruscus.”

Nicholas Culpeper

The first shoots from the root are “thick, whitish, and short, somewhat like those of Asparagus, but greater,” and the plant grows in copses and on heaths, often near the holly bushes; the decoction of the root “opens obstructions, provokes urine, helps to expel gravel and the stone, the stranguary and women’s courses, also the yellow jaundice and the head-ache.”

John Parkinson, as Grieve quotes him

It kept ‘hanged meate’ from the mice, and made brooms, “but the King’s Chamber is by revolution of time turned to the Butcher’s stall, for that a bundle of the stalkes tied together serveth them to cleanse their stalls.”