Felons of the Finger

A note on the heading

Plain sense

A whitlow: a painful gathering of matter (“imposthume”, an abscess) at the end of a finger, under or beside the nail. Culpeper’s Nailwort sentence gives the country names in a row: whitlows, felons, andicorns, nail-wheals.

What the entries treat

Three claims: 2 with a sentence, 1 from the index alone. Amara Dulcis: “Country people commonly take the berries of it, and having bruised them, apply them to felons, and thereby soon rid their fingers of such troublesome guests”; Nailwort, or Whitlow-grass, “for those imposthumes in the joints, and under the nails, which they call Whitlows, Felons, Andicorns and Nail-wheals”. “True Love” is listed in the index under a name the book has no entry for (the book’s “Herb True-Love, Or One-Berry”, under Cholic in this batch, may be the plant meant; the page does not say so).

Where the word comes from

Felon here is not the criminal, which Wiktionary keeps under a separate etymology: Middle English feloun, felone “type of carbuncle or sore with pus”, possibly from Old French and Latin fel “bile, gall; poison; venom”. Whitlow is Late Middle English, an alteration of whitflaw, its first element from Middle Dutch vijt or Low German fit “abscess”, influenced by white.

Today’s words

felon (fingertip abscess); whitlow; paronychia (beside the nail); fingertip infection — a broad match: the heading covers more than this, or several modern things.

How it reads today

Both old names are still in medicine, and they have been sorted: a felon is “an infection of the tip of the finger”, an abscess in the pad of the fingertip; paronychia is the infection beside or under the nail; and whitlow is also used of herpetic whitlow, a subtype where a herpes virus is the cause. Culpeper’s heading runs all of these together as “imposthumes in the joints, and under the nails”, so broad. The Amara Dulcis sentence is a country remedy he reports.

References

Wiktionary, s.v. “felon” (accessed 2026-10-28): Etymology 2, “From Middle English feloun, felone (‘type of carbuncle or sore with pus; swelling on a hawk’s body’)”, “possibly from Old French *felon, from Latin fel (‘bile, gall; bitterness; poison; venom’)”, kept apart from the criminal (Etymology 1); senses “(pathology, veterinary medicine) A small infected sore; an abscess, a boil” and “(often specifically) A whitlow”; Hardy 1874, “that felon upon his finger”. Wiktionary, s.v. “whitlow” (accessed 2026-10-28): “From Late Middle English, an alteration of whitflaw”, first element from Middle Dutch vijt or Low German fit (‘abscess’), “though also influenced by white”; “Inflammation and/or infection in the cuticle and/or the nailbed of a fingernail or toenail”, synonym felon, near-synonym paronychia. Wiktionary, s.v. “imposthume” (accessed 2026-10-28): “A corruption of aposteme”; “(obsolete) An abscess”. Wikipedia, “Whitlow (infection)” (accessed 2026-10-28): “A whitlow or felon is an infection of the tip of the finger”; a felon is an “extremely painful abscess on the palmar aspect of the fingertip”; “Herpetic whitlow and melanotic whitlow (subungual melanoma) are subtypes that are not synonymous with the term felon”; whitlow and felon are sometimes wrongly used for paronychia, the infection beside or beneath the nail.

ThinkDeep333, 2026-10-28 · draft, not yet checked. Offered beside Culpeper’s heading, never in its place; nothing here says whether a plant works.