Peppermint

Peppermint: what was it used for?

For the gut above all. “Peppermint oil is the most extensively used of all the volatile oils, both medicinally and commercially,” Grieve wrote, and its antispasmodic action, more marked than in any other oil, “greatly adds to its power of relieving pains arising in the alimentary canal”: dyspepsia, flatulence, colic, cramp, cholera and diarrhoea. It was given with purgatives to stop griping and used to disguise the taste of other drugs; the tea was taken at the first sign of a cold, and with elder flowers for influenza; menthol was rubbed on the temples for neuralgic headache and inhaled for the chest.

Peppermint: what does modern science say?

The European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee accepts peppermint oil on clinical evidence, as ‘well-established use’: for minor spasms of the gut, flatulence, and abdominal pain, “especially in patients with irritable bowel syndrome,” and for mild tension-type headache. For coughs and colds, local muscle pain, and itching of intact skin, and the leaf for indigestion and flatulence, it accepts traditional use only (monographs of 2020). The oil is chiefly menthol, 30 to 55 per cent, and menthone. A 2022 meta-analysis of ten trials in 1,030 patients with irritable bowel syndrome found the oil “superior to placebo,” but with more adverse events, and the quality of evidence “very low.” Pooled studies of oil given during colonoscopy found the colon relaxed, with fewer spasms.

Peppermint: what did the older authorities say?

Pliny, as Grieve reports him

The Greeks and Romans, she says, “crowned themselves with Peppermint at their feasts and adorned their tables with its sprays,” and their cooks flavoured sauces and wines with its essence; though she notes that some writers doubt whether either mint of the Greek physicians was the modern peppermint.

Mrs. M. Grieve

It is in the Icelandic pharmacopoeias of the thirteenth century, but only came into general use in western European medicine about the middle of the eighteenth, first in England. Ray first recognised it as a distinct species in 1696, and it entered the London Pharmacopoeia in 1721. Commercial growing at Mitcham in Surrey dates from about 1750, and “English oil is incomparably the best.”