Historical label: “Gout” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”.
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
A painful disease of the joints, in the hands or feet, treated here as a local pain to be eased with poultices; the sciatica (the hip) is its neighbour, and the Sciatica Cresses sentence treats them as one disease in different joints.
What the entries treat
Four claims, all with a sentence. Two are poultices to the painful place: Comfrey roots “beaten small, and spread upon leather, and laid upon any place troubled with the gout, doth presently give ease of the pains”; Elm bark ground with brine “laid on the place pained with the gout, gives great ease”. The other two are not: Gout-wort, with no method given, which Culpeper says “hath its name for nothing but upon experiment to heal the gout and sciatica”; Sciatica Cresses, the place “bathed with wine and oil mixed together” and “wrapped with wool or skins”, in a sentence that runs the sciatica and “gout in the hands or feet” together as “the same disease in hips, knuckle-bone, or other of the joints”.
Where the word comes from
Middle English goute, from Old French gote, from Latin gutta, “drop”: Wiktionary gives the sense shift from humorism, the notion of a morbid matter “dropping” from the blood into and around the joints.
Today’s words
gout (urate crystal arthritis); gouty arthritis; (for the hip sentences) sciatica — a broad match: the heading covers more than this, or several modern things.
How it reads today
Gout is now one named disease: an inflammatory arthritis from needle-shaped crystals of uric acid deposited in a joint, the base of the big toe in about half of cases. The old word was wider: Culpeper’s sentences put “gout in the hands or feet” and the sciatica under one disease of the joints, and nothing in them says which of his gouts were urate gout. The name itself is the humoral theory in one syllable, a “drop” of bad matter into the joint.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “gout” (accessed 2026-10-28): “From Middle English goute, from Old French gote, gute, from Latin gutta (‘drop’)”; the disease sense from humorism and “the notion of the ‘dropping’ of a morbid material from the blood in and around the joints”; sense “(pathology) an extremely painful inflammation of joints, especially of the big toe”. Wikipedia, “Gout” (accessed 2026-10-28): “Gout is a form of inflammatory arthritis characterized by recurrent attacks of pain in a red, tender, hot, and swollen joint”, caused by “the deposition of needle-shaped crystals of the monosodium salt of uric acid”; “In about half of cases, the joint at the base of the big toe is affected”.
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.
4 claims: 4 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone
ComfreySymphytum officinaleCLM-0023171850 index, p. 54
The roots of Comfrey taken fresh, beaten small, and spread upon leather, and laid upon any place troubled with the gout, doth presently give ease of the pains;
Sciatica CressesLepidium graminifoliumCLM-0023181850 index, p. 57
the place afterwards bathed with wine and oil mixed together, and then wrapped with wool or skins, after they have sweat a little, will assuredly cure not only the same disease in hips, knuckle-bone, or other of the joints, as gout in the hands or feet, but all other old griefs of the head, (as inveterate rheums,) and other parts of the body that are hard to be cured.