Printed in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases” as “—— Scabby” under “Head” (the dash stands for the heading above it, or its first word); shown here as “Head — Scabby”.
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 scalp crusted with scabs; Culpeper gives no cause. The two humour sentences are about rheum running down from the head, and belong with Brain (to strengthen) and Head.
What the entries treat
Three claims, one of them on the heading’s own word: Fox-glove, “I am confident that an ointment of it is one of the best remedies for scabby head that is”. The other two the index filed here for the head, not the scab: Knapweed “stays distillation of thin and sharp humours from the head upon the stomach and lungs”, and Nep, or Catmint, “in pains of the head coming of any cold cause, catarrhs, rheums, and for swimming and giddiness thereof”.
Where the word comes from
Scab: Middle English scabb, from Old English sceabb and Old Norse skabb; Latin scabies is among its cognates, and Wiktionary gives “scabies” as a colloquial or obsolete sense of scab itself.
Today’s words
crusted or scabby scalp; scalp dermatitis; scalp ringworm (tinea capitis); seborrhoeic dermatitis — a broad match: the heading covers more than this, or several modern things.
How it reads today
Our reading: several modern diseases crust a scalp (ringworm of the scalp, seborrhoeic dermatitis, impetigo), and one sentence does not tell them apart, so the terms are offered as a set. The false friend is scabies, the mite’s disease: Wiktionary lists it as a sense of “scab”, but Culpeper’s “scabby head” reads as crusted skin, our reading of his one sentence. Scurf has its own heading (CND-0115).
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “scab” (accessed 2026-10-28): “From Middle English scabb, scabbe … from Old English sċeabb and Old Norse skabb, both from Proto-Germanic *skabbaz (‘scab, scabies’)”, Latin scabies among the cognates; senses “incrustation over a sore, wound, vesicle, or pustule formed during healing” and “scabies”, the latter labelled colloquial or obsolete.
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.
3 claims: 3 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone
Fox-GloveDigitalis purpureaCLM-0023331850 index, p. 80
I am confident that an ointment of it is one of the best remedies for scabby head that is.
It is also used in pains of the head coming of any cold cause, catarrhs, rheums, and for swimming and giddiness thereof, and is of special use for the windiness of the stomach and belly.