# Snail

**Limax*, *cochlea*; snail water*

**Known today as.** Garden snails, shelled and boiled, distilled, or eaten.

Kind: Animal

## What was it used for?

Snail water, *aqua limacum*, stood in the London Dispensatory of 1653 to purge the lungs of phlegm and help consumptions; snails applied outwardly, Culpeper says, helped the gout, drew thorns out of the flesh, and stopped bleeding at the nose.

## What does modern science say?

Snail mucus has returned in skin creams, though clinical randomized trials of its safety and efficacy are still lacking.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **mucin glycoproteins**: the slime
- **allantoin**: 
- **glycolic acid**: 
- **haemocyanin**: the oxygen-carrying blood protein of gastropods, as in the keyhole limpet

**Mechanism.** Culpeper reasoned that snails cured consumption because man, made of the slime of the earth, is restored by their slime, and warned against purging it away; snail mucin in cosmetics has small trials for wound healing and photoaged skin; and the haemocyanin of the giant keyhole limpet, another gastropod, is used as a carrier protein to raise antibodies in research and therapy.

**Dose.** Raw or undercooked snails can carry rat lungworm, the commonest cause of eosinophilic meningitis in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

**Standing.** Snail mucin is a cosmetic ingredient; snail water is in the history books.

## What lore surrounds it?

In Thiselton-Dyer's wart-cures the snail is the northern one: “in the North, one has but to hang a snail on a thorn, and as the poor creature wastes away the warts will disappear.”

## What did the older authorities say?

**Pliny.** Calls a diet of snails, simmered and then grilled and eaten with wine and garum, one of the very best remedies for the stomach; bruised in water they are good for spitting of blood, and beaten up raw in warm water they allay a cough.

## Sources

- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History*.
- Thiselton-Dyer, T. F. (1889). *The Folk-lore of Plants*. Project Gutenberg #10118.
- Culpeper, N. (1653). *Pharmacop ia Londinensis, or, The London Dispensatory*. London: Peter Cole. Text Creation Partnership edition A35381.
- Hudz, N., et al. (2025). Chemical variability and biological potential of *Cornu aspersum* mucus as a source for the development of new cosmetic and pharmaceutical products. *Molecules* 30.
- Wikipedia, “Snail slime.”
- Wikipedia, “Keyhole limpet hemocyanin.”
- Wikipedia, “*Angiostrongylus cantonensis*.”
- Gentilcore, D. (2016). *Food and Health in Early Modern Europe*. Bloomsbury.
- Fabi, S. G., et al. (2013). “The effects of filtrate of the secretion of the *Cryptomphalus aspersa* on photoaged skin.” *Journal of Drugs in Dermatology* 12.

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*Snail.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/snail

Historical description, not medical advice.