Printed in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases” as “—— (Putrid)” under “Fevers” (the dash stands for the heading above it, or its first word); shown here as “Fevers — (Putrid)”.
Modern literature has not yet been searched for this heading’s claims: it comes only from the 1850 index and has no search words yet.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
Putrid is rotting, the dictionary’s sense. Culpeper’s putrid fever reads as one bred by something rotting in the body, which is how he uses the word elsewhere in this batch: Strawberries “putrifying in the stomach” increase a fever’s fits, Wood Sorrel hinders “putrefaction of blood”. Our reading; the one sentence here does not describe the fever.
What the entries treat
One sentence, Borage and Bugloss, which also sits under Fevers and under the pestilential sub-heading: “The leaves and roots are to very good purpose used in putrid and pestilential fevers, to defend the heart, and help to resist and expel the poison, or the venom of other creatures”. Elecampane’s sentence under Fevers names “putrid and pestilential fevers” too, but the index does not list it here.
Where the word comes from
Latin putridus, “rotten, decayed”, from putreo, “to be rotten or putrid”, through Old French putride or directly; in English from the 14th century by Wiktionary’s dating.
Today’s words
typhus (one disease the old name was given to); no single modern name — uncertain: the text does not let us tell.
How it reads today
“Putrid fever” is gone from medicine. Epidemic typhus carries it among its old names, with camp fever, jail fever and ship fever, so a reader may meet it there; but the old category was a kind of fever, not a germ, and one sentence does not let us say what Culpeper’s putrid fever was. The word itself now means rotting or foul-smelling.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “putrid” (accessed 2026-10-28): “From Middle English, borrowed from Old French putride or directly from Latin putridus (‘rotten, decayed’), from putreō (‘to be rotten or putrid’), from puter (‘rotten, decaying, putrid’)”; sense “rotting, rotten, putrefying”, labelled from the 14th century. Wikipedia, “Epidemic typhus” (accessed 2026-10-28): “The causative organism is Rickettsia prowazekii, transmitted by the human body louse”; other names listed “Camp fever, jail fever, hospital fever, ship fever, famine fever, putrid fever, petechial fever”.
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.
1 claim: 1 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone
The leaves and roots are to very good purpose used in putrid and pestilential fevers, to defend the heart, and help to resist and expel the poison, or the venom of other creatures: