Knotgrass

Knotgrass: what was it used for?

An astringent herb for bleeding, fluxes, and the urine. Dioscorides gave its juice as astringent and cooling for those spitting blood, discharges of the bowel, and slow painful urination. Culpeper made its juice “most effectual to stay bleeding of the mouth,” and of the nose when applied to the temples or squirted into the nostrils, and found it singularly good to provoke urine and expel gravel and stone. Grieve sums it up as useful in diarrhoea, bleeding piles, “and all haemorrhages,” formerly much used as a wound herb and styptic.

Knotgrass: 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,” for the symptoms of the common cold, for minor inflammations of the mouth or throat, and to increase the amount of urine and flush the urinary tract in minor urinary complaints (monograph of 2016). Its assessment report finds 3.5 to 4 per cent of tannins with phenolic acids, coumarins, and the lignan aviculin.

Knotgrass: what did the older authorities say?

Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653)

“Saturn seems to me to own the herb, and yet some hold the Sun; out of doubt ’tis Saturn.” Its distilled water he counted “one of the most sovereign remedies to cool all manner of inflammations,” for hot swellings, gangrene, and foul ulcers, and the juice dropped into the ears to cleanse them.

Dioscorides, De materia medica 4.4

The male polugonon, which the modern translators identify with knotgrass, is a tender herb of many slender jointed branches creeping along the earth like grass, with seed by every leaf, “which is why it is called the male.”