A heading of ours (added October 2026), not the 1850 index’s. It holds sentences the index would have filed under “Brain, (to strengthen)”, read for direction: here Culpeper says the plant causes or harms, or the index heading did not fit.
Modern reading: cognition. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with cognition OR memory OR nootropic OR neuroprotective. The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
Harm to the head by hot “vapours” rising from hot foods, in the old physiology; and one tall tale Culpeper passes on.
What the entries treat
Three warnings: raw Chives “send up very hurtful vapours to the brain, causing troublesome sleep, and spoiling the eye-sight”; Garlic, “all vehement hot things send up but ill-favoured vapours to the brain”; Basil, Hilarius’s story of a man who “by common smelling to it, had a scorpion bred in his brain”.
(none; search aids only) brain; headache — no modern condition corresponds; the words are search aids only.
How it reads today
No modern condition. Read as Culpeper’s cautions on hot foods, and the scorpion as a story he reports, not a claim. A heading of ours, from the verb pass; the word is under CND-0021.
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.
This heading is ours. A keyword search had filed these under “Brain (to strengthen)”, but in each sentence Culpeper says the plant harms it. They are listed so his words stay on record, not as a remedy.
3 claims: 3 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone
If they be eaten raw, (I do not mean raw, opposite to roasted or boiled, but raw, opposite to chymical preparation) they send up very hurtful vapours to the brain, causing troublesome sleep, and spoiling the eye-sight, yet of them prepared by the art of the alchymist, may be made an excellent remedy for the stoppage of the urine.