Historical label: “Miscarriage, (good against)” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”. Shown as “Miscarriage (good against)”.
Modern reading: miscarriage. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with miscarriage OR "abortion, spontaneous" OR pregnancy. The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
Losing a pregnancy before its time; the plants are to keep it. Culpeper’s “abortion or miscarriage” is one loss, and the index gives it two headings.
What the entries treat
Four claims: three with a sentence, one from the index alone. Bistort’s root in wine “hinders abortion or miscarriage in child-bearing”; Garden Tansy “bruised and applied to the navel, stays miscarriages”; the Medlar, a plaister of the fruit dried “applied to the reins of the back, stops miscarriage in women with child”. Ladies’ Mantle is listed in the index with no sentence naming it. The same ground as Abortion (to prevent), CND-0002, where Bistort’s sentence also sits.
Where the word comes from
mis- + carriage. Wiktionary dates the old general sense, “a failure; a mistake or error” (now rare except in “miscarriage of justice”), to the 16th century, with Spenser 1590, and the pregnancy sense to the 17th.
Today’s words
miscarriage; threatened miscarriage; pregnancy loss; spontaneous abortion (medicine’s own term) — the modern term names the same thing.
How it reads today
The same word, the same thing. The dictionary’s synonyms are pregnancy loss and spontaneous abortion, and it notes that a death during labour or after the child is viable is called a stillbirth. The index’s two headings, this and Abortion (to prevent), are one complaint under two of Culpeper’s words.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “miscarriage” (accessed 2026-10-28): from mis- + carriage; sense “a failure; a mistake or error”, 16th century, “now rare except in miscarriage of justice”, Spenser 1590; sense “the spontaneous natural termination of a pregnancy, especially before it is viable”, 17th century, synonyms “pregnancy loss”, “spontaneous abortion”; usage note that the death of an infant during labour or after becoming viable “is generally called a stillbirth”.
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: 3 with a sentence, 1 from the index alone
Also a plaister made of the fruit dried before they are rotten, and other convenient things, and applied to the reins of the back, stops miscarriage in women with child.