# Turpentine

**Trementina**

**Known today as.** The oleoresin of the larch (“Venice” turpentine) or of the terebinth (“Chian” turpentine).

Kind: Resin & Wood

## What did Canale use it for?

The base of the oil for hexes, bewitchments, chills, and wounds, to be drunk a quarter ounce a day for a month (ch. 9).

## What does modern science say?

A poison in quantity: as little as 15 ml can kill a child. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century it was widely used on wounds.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **alpha-pinene**: 60–90 per cent of the oil
- **beta-pinene**: 
- **delta-3-carene**: 
- **abietic acid**: in the rosin left after distillation

**Mechanism.** On the skin the oil is a rubefacient that dilates the vessels and counter-irritates, and it is antiseptic; swallowed, it irritates the stomach and is excreted by the kidney, which it inflames, and the lungs, giving the urine a violet smell. Aspiration into the lungs is the danger in children. Canale’s quarter ounce a day for a month is a dose that would damage the kidneys.

**Dose.** Fatal doses in adults are recorded from 120 ml; children have died from 15 ml; the Commission E allows it externally only.

**Standing.** Commission E approves purified turpentine oil externally for rheumatic complaints and in inhalations; internal use is obsolete.

## What lore surrounds it?

Of the terebinth, the tree of Chian turpentine, Folkard writes that it “is a tree much venerated by the Jews. Abraham pitched his tent beneath the shade of a Terebinth at Mamre,” that Josephus held “the Terebinth of Abraham had flourished ever since the creation of the world,” and that “the Jews, by preference, bury their dead beneath the shadow of a Terebinth.” Of the larch he notes that “Ben Jonson, in the ‘Masque of Queens,’ speaks of the gum or turpentine of the Larch as being used in witchcraft,” the witch bringing “juice that from the Larch-tree comes,” and that from the balm of Gilead fir “a very fine turpentine is obtained, which is sometimes sold as the true Balm of Gilead.”

## What did the older authorities say?

**Pliny.** Of the terebinth of Syria, the male bears no fruit and the female a red fruit the size of a lentil or a pale one ripening with the grape, “of a very agreeable smell, and sticky and resinous to the touch”; about Ida and in Macedonia the tree is short and shrubby, at Damascus large; and resin of terebinth is among the ingredients of the Mendesian unguent.

## Sources

- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 13.12, 13.2, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library.
- Folkard, R. (1884). *Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics*, “Terebinth.” Project Gutenberg #44638.
- Folkard, R. (1884). *Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics*, “Larch.” Project Gutenberg #44638.
- Folkard, R. (1884). *Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics*, “Fir.” Project Gutenberg #44638.
- Blumenthal, M., ed. (1998). *The Complete German Commission E Monographs*, “Turpentine oil, purified.”
- Goldfrank’s *Toxicologic Emergencies*, 11th ed. (2019), “Hydrocarbons.”

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

Historical description, not medical advice.