HERB - woad musings

Kathleen Keeler kkeeler at unlserve.unl.edu
Mon Mar 26 09:43:40 PST 2001


Greetings
re woad

 Jamieson B. Hurry, M.A., M.D., 1857-1930 published posthumously in 1930 The
Woad Plant and Its Dye (Oxford University Press, London, 1930), 314 pages of
more than you ever wanted to know about woad.  (I ran up to the library stacks
where in languishes in the Dewey section).

   Hurry has a chapter on Woad in Herbals, listing what Turner (1538, 1548),
Dodoenns (1563), Pena and de l'Obel (1570), de l'Obel (1576) Lyte (1578),
Durante (1585), Gerarde (1597), Parkinson (1640), Culpeper (1642), Pechey
(1707), Salmon (1710), Hill (1754)
and a chapter on Woad in Therapeutics which includes Pliny, Galen, Syraic Book
of Medicine, Dioscorides, Muller, Hippocrates, Ray, Cockayne,...and a table of
the uses.
No mention _anywhere_ of any psychological effects, whether the stuff is used
on wounds or drunk, however you extract it.

He asserts that all the uses in all those herbals were faith healing, since it
is totally absent from modern (1930) medicinal works.
 He ends the therapeutics chapter saying "It is worthy of notice that the
therapeutic use of woad has been singularly free from mystic rites or
charlatans, such as were common in the use of other herbs."

I haven't time right  now to check the technical economic botany literature.  I
did look it up in the books in my office. They have it as a dye plant only.

So, I too have found no reports of psychoactivity.

disappointing, really...
Agnes



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