Fits

A note on the heading

Plain sense

Culpeper’s “fit” is the bout of a disease that comes and goes, above all an ague’s hot or cold fit. What the index meant by the bare heading, the one entry cannot tell us.

What the entries treat

One index name and no sentence: Wild Arrach (p. 10), a name the book has no herbal entry under. Elsewhere in this batch the word is the fit of a fever: the Strawberries sentence under Fevers (Culpeper says it harms), CND-0049, has the fruit increasing a fever’s fits.

Where the word comes from

Wiktionary gives the origin as unknown: Middle English fit, “hardship, danger”, possibly from Old English fitt, “conflict”, a word attested only once.

Today’s words

seizure; convulsion (what “fits” means now); the fit, or paroxysm, of a fever (what the book mostly means) — uncertain: the text does not let us tell.

How it reads today

“Fits” today means seizures, and a reader typing it is looking for epilepsy, which the book files under Falling Sickness (CND-0046). In the herbal a fit is mostly the hot or cold stage of an ague, and the one name here has no sentence to say which sense the index had in mind.

References

Wiktionary, s.v. “fit” (accessed 2026-10-28) (Etymology 3): origin “Unknown. From Middle English fit (‘hardship, danger’), possibly from Old English fitt (‘conflict’) — a word only attested once”; senses “a seizure or convulsion” and “(medicine) a sudden and vigorous appearance of a symptom over a short period of time”.

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