Historical label: “Shingles” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”.
Modern reading: shingles. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with "herpes zoster" OR shingles OR "varicella zoster" OR antiviral. The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
A hot, spreading, running eruption of the skin, filed with St. Anthony’s fire and the tetters and cooled from outside. The sentences do not describe the band.
What the entries treat
Five claims, each in a list of hot or running skin troubles. Cinquefoil for “inflammations, and St. Anthony’s fire, all imposthumes, and painful sores with heat and putrefaction, the shingles also, and all other sorts of running and foul scabs, sores and itch”; Houseleek “cools and restrains all other hot inflammations, St. Anthony’s fire, scaldings and burnings, the shingles, fretting ulcers, cankers, tettors, ringworms, and the like”; Nightshade “for the shingles, ringworms, and in all running, fretting and corroding ulcers, applied thereunto”; Cow Parsnips for “the running scab and shingles”; Plantain water with beef brine for “all manner of tetters, ringworms, the shingles, and all other running and fretting sores”.
Where the word comes from
Latin cingulus, a variant of cingulum “girdle”, translating Greek zṓnē and zōstḗr: the name is a belt.
Today’s words
shingles (herpes zoster); zoster — a broad match: the heading covers more than this, or several modern things.
How it reads today
The same word, now with a cause: herpes zoster, “a viral disease characterized by a painful skin rash with blisters in a localized area”, from the varicella zoster virus “that also causes chickenpox”, which can stay dormant for years and then “reactivate and travel along nerve bodies to nerve endings in the skin, producing blisters”; “typically the rash occurs in a single, wide mark either on the left or right side of the body or face”. Culpeper’s shingles is any hot running eruption in a list, so whether each sentence means the zoster rash the text does not tell.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “shingles” (accessed 2026-10-28): from Latin cingulus, variant of cingulum “girdle”, translating Ancient Greek ζώνη, ζωστήρ; sense “(pathology, informal) herpes zoster”, caused by Human herpes virus 3. Wikipedia, “Shingles” (accessed 2026-10-28): “a viral disease characterized by a painful skin rash with blisters in a localized area”; “caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV) that also causes chickenpox”; the virus can stay dormant “for years or decades, after which it may reactivate and travel along nerve bodies to nerve endings in the skin, producing blisters”; “Typically the rash occurs in a single, wide mark either on the left or right side of the body or face”.
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.
5 claims: 5 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone
as also inflammations, and St. Anthony’s fire, all imposthumes, and painful sores with heat and putrefaction, the shingles also, and all other sorts of running and foul scabs, sores and itch.
It cools and restrains all other hot inflammations, St. Anthony’s fire, scaldings and burnings, the shingles, fretting ulcers, cankers, tettors, ringworms, and the like;
One part of Plantain water, and two parts of the brine of powdered beef, boiled together and clarified, is a most sure remedy to heal all spreading scabs or itch in the head and body, all manner of tetters, ringworms, the shingles, and all other running and fretting sores.