# Epithymum (Cuscuta epithymum)

**Epitimo**

**Known today as.** Dodder growing on thyme, *Cuscuta epithymum*, a parasitic plant.

Kind: Plant

## What did Canale use it for?

One of the first purges, for melancholy (ch. 2; see note XXIX).

## What does modern science say?

Dodder was traditionally used as a purge and for urinary complaints, but modern studies have not confirmed a laxative action; its reputation as a purger of “black bile” belongs to humoral medicine.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **kaempferol and quercetin glycosides**: 
- **cuscutin**: 
- **the host’s compounds**: dodder takes up the thyme it grows on

**Mechanism.** Epithymum is the dodder (*Cuscuta epithymum*) parasitic on thyme, which the Arabs and Galenists made the specific purge of black bile; it is a mild laxative at best, and the melancholy it purged does not exist as a humour. The Chinese dodder seed (*C. chinensis*, tu si zi) is a tonic in that pharmacopoeia.

**Dose.** No toxicity recorded.

**Standing.** No monograph; obsolete in Europe since the eighteenth century.

## What lore surrounds it?

Dodder carries a rich folklore of its own. Its folk names in English and American tradition include love vine, angel hair, witches’ shoelaces, devil’s-gut, and strangle-weed. In the Missouri River country and the old South, a young woman would toss a strand over her shoulder onto a neighboring plant: if it took hold and grew within a few days, her suitor was judged faithful, a test held more reliable than pulling petals. Medieval Byzantine farming texts, oddly, associated the plant with lions.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Pliny.** Gives juice of epithymum, with cotyledon, axle-grease, and leaves of batrachion, for chilblains, and epithymum “used as a liniment, with vinegar” for pains and indurations of the sinews.

## Sources

- Native Plant Society of Texas, on dodder.
- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 26.66, 26.81, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library.
- Donnapee, S., et al. (2014). “*Cuscuta chinensis* Lam.: a systematic review on ethnopharmacology, phytochemistry and pharmacology.” *Journal of Ethnopharmacology* 157.

---

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

Historical description, not medical advice.