Strawberry

Strawberry: what was it used for?

Both leaves and fruit stood in the early pharmacopoeias, Grieve says, the leaves the more used: laxative, diuretic, and astringent, the root and a tea of the leaves given for diarrhoea and dysentery. Culpeper made the ripe berries cooling, “excellently good to cool the liver, the blood, and the spleen, or an hot choleric stomach,” and the leaves and roots boiled in wine and water a drink to provoke urine and stay the bloody flux. Grieve calls the fruit “invaluable” in feverish conditions and recommended for stone, and a cut strawberry rubbed on the face after washing a way to whiten the skin and take off slight sunburn.

Strawberry: what does modern science say?

The European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee accepts the leaf as a traditional herbal medicine for two uses: to increase the amount of urine and so flush the urinary tract, as an adjuvant in minor urinary complaints, and for the symptomatic treatment of mild diarrhoea. It grants these, as it grants every traditional use, “exclusively based upon long-standing use,” not on trials (monograph of 2018). Its assessment report of 2026 finds the leaves rich in tannins, put at 5 to 10 per cent in the reference works it cites, with phenolic acids including ellagic and gallic acid, and soluble sugars as the main matter of a hot-water extract. The first trial of the leaf in people, published in 2026, gave 109 older adults with memory complaints an extract or a placebo for twelve weeks; on its main measures the two groups did not differ, and only exploratory comparisons favoured the extract.

Strawberry: what did the older authorities say?

Nicholas Culpeper

“Strawberries, when they are green, are cool and dry; but when they are ripe, they are cool and moist.” He would have them cool the liver and quench thirst, yet keep them from the fevered, “lest by their putrifying in the stomach they increase the fits.” The distilled water of the berries he calls “a sovereign remedy and cordial in the panting and beating of the heart,” and good for the yellow jaundice; the juice cleanses foul ulcers.

Mrs. M. Grieve

Culpeper, she notes, declared the plant “singularly good for the healing of many ills,” but she gives Linnaeus the credit as “the first to discover and prove the efficacy of the berries as a cure for rheumatic gout.” Bacon found in the odour of the dying leaves “a most excellent cordial smell.”