Historical label: “Sore Breasts” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”.
Modern reading: sore breasts. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with mastitis OR "breast pain" OR mastalgia OR lactation. The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
Painful, hot breasts and sore nipples in women; the remedies cool and heal from outside. Read with Flea-wort’s “nipples”, the nursing mother is the likely patient (our reading; only Succory’s sentence, filed elsewhere, says so).
What the entries treat
Three claims, all with a sentence, all for women. Flea-wort “is also good to heal the nipples and sore breasts of women, being often applied thereunto”; Purslain juice with oil of roses “for women’s sore breasts, and to allay the heat in all other sores or hurts”; Quince-seed mucilage boiled in water “to cool the heat and heal the sore breasts of women”. The nursing breast is named under Sore Eyes, CND-0124, in Succory’s sentence about nurses’ breasts pained by the abundance of milk.
Today’s words
mastitis (inflammation of the breast); breast pain (mastalgia); sore or cracked nipples; breast engorgement — a broad match: the heading covers more than this, or several modern things.
How it reads today
Reads as it did. Medicine sorts a sore breast by its cause, engorgement, a blocked duct, mastitis, cracked nipples; the three sentences name none and treat the heat. Not the Swellings heading’s “hardness of women’s breasts”, which sits there.
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
The juice is used with oil of roses for the same causes, or for blasting by lightning, and burnings by gunpowder, or for women’s sore breasts, and to allay the heat in all other sores or hurts;