Historical label: “Abortion, (to prevent)” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”. Shown as “Abortion (to prevent)”.
Modern reading: miscarriage. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with miscarriage OR "abortion, spontaneous" OR "threatened abortion". The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
Losing a pregnancy before its time. Culpeper writes “abortion or miscarriage” as one thing, and the heading is about keeping a wanted pregnancy.
What the entries treat
Two sentences and two index names. Bistort “hinders abortion or miscarriage in child-bearing”; Tormentil is “an assured remedy against abortion, if it proceed from the over flexibility or weakness of the inward retentive faculty” (the womb’s power to hold, in the old physiology). Sage and Garden Tansy are listed in the index with no sentence naming it.
Where the word comes from
Latin abortio, from aborior “to miscarry”. Wiktionary’s earliest quotation for the miscarriage sense is 1605; the induced sense is what the word mostly means now.
Today’s words
miscarriage; threatened miscarriage; spontaneous abortion (medicine’s own term) — the modern term names the same thing.
How it reads today
A reader today sees “abortion” and thinks of a deliberate ending of a pregnancy. In 1653 the word meant the loss itself, by any cause, and these entries are for women trying not to lose one. The word now means the procedure; in Culpeper it means the miscarriage.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “abortion” (accessed 2026-10-28): from Latin abortiōnem, aborior “to miscarry”; sense 1.1 “a spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage”, labelled “now uncommon in general use”, quotations dated 1605 and 1809; sense 1.2 the induced abortion, unlabelled.
ThinkDeep333, 2026-10-28 · draft, not yet checked. Offered beside Culpeper’s heading, never in its place; nothing here says whether a plant works.
Old claims, quoted verbatim: not medical advice. A warning sits above the claims and never hides them; no warning does not mean safe, only that no source here has flagged the plant.
4 claims: 2 with a sentence, 2 from the index alone
The powder or decoction drank, or to sit thereon as a bath, is an assured remedy against abortion, if it proceed from the over flexibility or weakness of the inward retentive faculty;