Historical label: “Chin-Cough” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”.
Modern reading: whooping cough. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with pertussis OR "whooping cough". The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
The whooping cough, by its older English name; Culpeper calls it a disease of children.
What the entries treat
Two claims, both with a sentence. Mallows: “The dried roots boiled in milk and drank, is especially good for the chin-cough”. Thyme, of which Culpeper says “neither is there scarce a better remedy growing for that disease in children which they commonly call the Chin-cough, than it is”.
Where the word comes from
A variant of the earlier “chink cough”, Wiktionary says, chink being a verb “to gasp, to convulse with coughing or laughter”; it compares Scots kink-host and Dutch kinkhoest. Also spelled chincough and kinkcough.
Today’s words
whooping cough; pertussis — the modern term names the same thing.
How it reads today
The name has changed, the disease has not: whooping cough, pertussis, a bacterial infection (Bordetella pertussis) with weeks of coughing fits and the drawn-in whoop after them; it is vaccine-preventable. Nothing about the chin: the first word is the gasp.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “chin cough” (accessed 2026-10-28): “Variant of earlier chink cough”, chink a verb meaning to gasp, to convulse with coughing or laughter, with Scots kink-host and Dutch kinkhoest compared; alternative forms chincough and kinkcough; sense “(archaic) Synonym of whooping cough”. Wikipedia, “Whooping cough” (accessed 2026-10-28): “is a highly contagious, vaccine-preventable bacterial disease caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis”; “Following a fit of coughing, a high-pitched whoop sound or gasp may occur as the person breathes in”; “also known as pertussis or the 100-day cough”.
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