Historical label: “Apoplexy” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”.
Modern reading: stroke. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with stroke OR cerebrovascular OR neuroprotective OR ischemia. The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
A sudden striking-down: the person drops, loses sense and movement, and may be left with palsy or lost speech. Culpeper files it among the “cold” diseases of the head and brain.
What the entries treat
6 claims. Lavender for “griefs and pains of the head and brain that proceed of a cold cause, as the apoplexy, falling-sickness, the dropsy, or sluggish malady, cramps, convulsions, palsies, and often faintings”; Lily of the Valley “restores lost speech, helps the palsy, and is excellently good in the apoplexy”; Wall-flowers in a conserve “for the apoplexy and palsy”; Mistletoe hung at the neck; Mellilot to “preserve” from it, Pellitory of Spain “preventing” it.
Where the word comes from
Greek apoplēxia, from apoplēssein “to cripple by a stroke”; English “stroke” is the same picture in plain words.
Today’s words
stroke; cerebrovascular accident — the modern term names the same thing.
How it reads today
“Apoplexy” survives mostly in “apoplectic”, meaning furious. The medical sense, now dated, is loss of consciousness or function from a bleed or a stroke in the brain.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “apoplexy” (accessed 2026-10-28): from Ancient Greek ἀποπληξία, from ἀποπλήσσω “to cripple by a stroke”; sense “(medicine, dated) loss of consciousness or ability to function caused by a brain bleed or stroke”; informal sense “extreme rage”.
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.
6 claims: 6 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone
LavenderLavandula angustifoliaCLM-0001181850 index
Lavender is of a special good use for all the griefs and pains of the head and brain that proceed of a cold cause, as the apoplexy, falling-sickness, the dropsy, or sluggish malady, cramps, convulsions, palsies, and often faintings.
The spirit of the flowers distilled in wine, restores lost speech, helps the palsy, and is excellently good in the apoplexy, comforts the heart and vital spirits.
Some have so highly esteemed it for the virtues thereof, that they have called it _Lignum Sanctiæ Crucis_, Wood of the Holy Cross, believing it helps the falling sickness, apoplexy and palsy very speedily, not only to be inwardly taken, but to be hung at their neck.
thereby not only easing pains in the head and teeth, but also hinders the distilling of the brain upon the lungs and eyes, thereby preventing coughs, phthisicks and consumption, the apoplexy and falling sickness.