# Nettle seed (Urtica dioica)

**Seme d’urtica**

**Known today as.** Seed of the stinging nettle, *Urtica dioica*.

Kind: Plant

## What did Canale use it for?

Powdered, with honeyed water, as a vomit (ch. 5).

## What does modern science say?

Pliny says the seed, taken in honeyed water, gives a gentle vomit, and acts as a laxative.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **linoleic acid**: the seed oil
- **tocopherols**: 
- **secoisolariciresinol**: a lignan, in the root
- **histamine and formic acid**: in the stinging hairs of the leaf

**Mechanism.** The seed is an oily food with nothing emetic in it, and Canale’s vomit was the honeyed water and the quantity; the leaf’s sting is histamine, acetylcholine, and serotonin injected by the hair, and the leaf extract is anti-inflammatory in arthritis trials; the root’s lignans and sterols ease the symptoms of an enlarged prostate.

**Dose.** Safe; the sting is self-limiting.

**Standing.** EMA monographs (2008, 2012) for the leaf in minor joint pain and as a diuretic, and for the root in benign prostatic hyperplasia, with a controlled trial of 620 men (Safarinejad, 2005).

## What lore surrounds it?

The plant’s sting had a folk use of its own: Roman soldiers in cold Britain are said to have flogged their limbs with nettles to warm them, a practice called urtication that survived as a folk remedy for arthritis and sciatica for some two thousand years.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Pliny.** “What plant can there possibly be that is more an object of our aversion than the nettle?” Yet its seed, according to Nicander, is an antidote to the poison of hemlock, of fungi, and of quicksilver, and Apollodorus gives it in the broth of a boiled tortoise for the bite of the salamander; the sting itself braces the uvula and wakes the lethargic when their legs and forehead are touched with it; the root arrests bleeding at the nostrils; “nettle-seed should be gathered at harvest-time: that of Alexandria is the most highly esteemed”; and in Egypt an oil, cnidinum, was pressed from it.

## Sources

- World Wide Words, “Urtication.”
- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 22.15, 15.7, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library.
- EMA/HMPC (2012). *Community herbal monograph on Urtica dioica L., Urtica urens L., radix* (EMA/HMPC/461160/2008).
- Safarinejad, M. R. (2005). “*Urtica dioica* for treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia: a prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study.” *Journal of Herbal Pharmacotherapy* 5.

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

Historical description, not medical advice.