Historical label: “Almonds of the Ears” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”.
Modern reading: the tonsils. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with tonsillitis OR tonsil OR lymphadenitis. The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
The tonsils, named for their shape; the complaint is their swelling. Culpeper says both “almonds of the ears” and “almonds and throat”; “fallen down”, in Water-Caltrops’ sentence, reads as swollen and hanging (our reading of the sentence, not a dictionary sense).
What the entries treat
Two claims. Devil’s-bit, with honey of roses, “is very effectual to help the inveterate tumours and swellings of the almonds and throat, by often gargling the mouth therewith”; Water-Caltrops “helps those swellings which, when people have, they say the almonds of the ears are fallen down”.
Where the word comes from
Almond: Middle English almaunde, Old French alemande, Late Latin amandula, Latin amygdala, Greek amygdalē; the same Greek word gives today’s amygdala. Wiktionary’s example for the tonsil sense is from 1828 (“the almonds or tonsils”); Culpeper’s use here is older.
Today’s words
tonsils; tonsillitis; swollen tonsils; enlarged tonsils — the modern term names the same thing.
How it reads today
Nobody calls them almonds now. The heading is not about the ear: the Devil’s-bit remedy is a gargle. A reader searching “tonsils” should land here.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “almond” (accessed 2026-10-28): “Anything shaped like an almond; specifically, (anatomy, archaic) a tonsil”, with David Craigie, Elements of General and Pathological Anatomy (1828), “the almonds or tonsils”; etymology from Middle English almaunde, Old French alemande, Late Latin amandula, Latin amygdala, Ancient Greek ἀμυγδάλη, doublet of amygdala.
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.
2 claims: 2 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone
Devil’s-BitSuccisa pratensisCLM-0022681850 index, p. 245
The decoction of the herb, with honey of roses put therein, is very effectual to help the inveterate tumours and swellings of the almonds and throat, by often gargling the mouth therewith.