# Endive (Cichorium endivia)

**Endivia**

**Known today as.** *Cichorium endivia*, the salad plant.

Kind: Plant  
Qualities: Cold and dry (Galenic tradition).

## What did Canale use it for?

Its water and syrup as cooling preparatives for choleric patients; in baths for hot complexions (chs. 2–3, 7).

## What does modern science say?

Harmless and mildly bitter. “Cooling” is a humoral category, not a pharmacological one.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **lactucin**: the bitter lactone
- **inulin**: 
- **potassium**: 

**Mechanism.** A bitter salad of the chicory family; the cooling in the Galenic sense is water and potassium, and the bitterness stimulates digestion.

**Dose.** A food.

**Standing.** A food; no monograph.

## What lore surrounds it?

Folkard records that the endive or succory is “according to the oldest Greek Alexandrian translations of the Bible, one of the ‘bitter herbs’” of the Passover, that the Egyptians called it Chicouryeh, whence Cichorium, and that the wild succory “opens its petals at 8 a.m., and closes them at 4 p.m.” The Germans, he says, hold “that once upon a time the Endives were men under a ban. The blue flowers, which are plentiful, were good men; the white flowers, much rarer, were evil-doers.” The blue blossom is their Wegewarte, “the watcher of the roads,” and a German legend makes it a maiden who waited on the road for a betrothed who never returned, until “on the spot where she breathed her last sigh sprang up a little pale flower which was the Wegewarte, the watcher of the road.”

Thiselton-Dyer adds that “in Germany now-a-days endive-seed is sold for its supposed power to influence the affections,” and quotes Gay's flowers scattered on graves, “rosemary, daisy, butter'd flower, and endive blue.”

## What did the older authorities say?

**Pliny.** Counts endive among the plants that “will grow even without any cultivation,” with wild mint, catmint, and pennyroyal; it is “better able to endure the rigours of the winter than the lettuce,” of a more acrid taste, sown at the beginning of spring and transplanted at its end; and a spreading kind, known in Egypt as cichorium, he promises to treat elsewhere.

**Culpeper.** Calls it “a fine cooling, cleansing, jovial plant”: the decoction, the juice, or the distilled water cools the excessive heat of the liver and stomach and the hot fits of agues, the seeds are “of the same property, or rather more powerful,” and “you cannot use it amiss; a syrup of it is a fine cooling medicine for fevers.”

## Sources

- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 19.37, 19.39, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library.
- Culpeper, N. (1653). *The Complete Herbal*, “Endive.” Project Gutenberg #49513.
- Folkard, R. (1884). *Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics*, “Endive.” Project Gutenberg #44638.
- Thiselton-Dyer, T. F. (1889). *The Folk-lore of Plants*. Project Gutenberg #10118.
- Street, R. A., et al. (2013). “*Cichorium intybus*: traditional uses, phytochemistry, pharmacology, and toxicology.” *Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine*.

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*Endive.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/endive

Historical description, not medical advice.