Horsetail

Horsetail: what was it used for?

A diuretic and staunching herb. Grieve gives it for dropsy, gravel, and kidney complaints, and the powdered herb as “very effectual in spitting of blood”; the decoction, she says, applied outwardly “will stop the bleeding of wounds and quickly heal them.” Culpeper found it “very powerful to staunch bleeding either inward or outward,” good for fluxes and bloody urine, for ulcers, for the stone, and for “a cough that comes by distillations from the head.”

Horsetail: what does modern science say?

The European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee accepts the herb as a traditional herbal medicine, “exclusively based upon long-standing use,” to increase the amount of urine and so flush the urinary tract, as an adjuvant in minor urinary complaints, and for the supportive treatment of superficial wounds (monograph of 2016). Its assessment report finds 5 to 7.7 per cent silicic acid and silicates and flavonoid glycosides of kaempferol and quercetin, and notes that the fresh and dried plant hold much thiaminase, an enzyme destroyed by heating to 80°C and not found active in the industrial extracts.

Horsetail: what did the older authorities say?

Dioscorides

His hippouris grows in moist places and ditches, with hollow reddish jointed stalks surrounded by thin rushy leaves and black filaments “similar to the tail of a horse.” Its juice stops nosebleeds; drunk in wine it helps dysentery and brings on urine, and sprinkled on it closes bleeding wounds.

Nicholas Culpeper

“The herb belongs to Saturn, yet is very harmless,” the smoother kind better than the rough. It “soon solders together the tops of green wounds,” and “cures all ruptures in children.”