Melilot

Melilot: what was it used for?

A plaster and fomentation for swellings. Grieve calls it aromatic, emollient, and carminative, and “Applied as a plaster, or in ointment, or as a fomentation, it is an old-fashioned country remedy for the relief of abdominal and rheumatic pains.” Gerard boiled it in sweet wine with egg yolk, linseed meal, marsh mallow roots, and hog’s grease for a poultice that “doth asswge and soften all manner of swellings,” and dropped the juice into the eyes to clear the sight; Culpeper, she reports, had the head washed with the distilled herb for loss of senses and apoplexy. A still-room book of 1651 puts melilot flowers into ‘a bath for Melancholy.’

Melilot: 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 relieve discomfort and heaviness of the legs from minor disorders of the veins, and for minor inflammation of the skin (monograph of 2017). Its assessment report finds coumarin at 0.3 to 0.9 per cent, formed during drying from glucosides of hydroxycinnamic acid, and the coumaric acid glycoside melilotoside.

Melilot: what did the older authorities say?

Galen, as Grieve reports him

He “used to prescribe Melilot plaster to his Imperial and aristocratic patients when they suffered from inflammatory tumours or swelled joints,” and the plaster, she adds, was still so used in parts of the Continent.

John Gerard, as Grieve quotes him

Melilot was then a common crop that ran wild: “for certainty no part of the world doth enjoy so great plenty thereof as England and especially Essex,” where between Sudbury and Clare he saw many acres overgrown with it, so that “it doth not only spoil their land, but the corn also.”