Printed in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases” as “—— (hot)” under “Tumours” (the dash stands for the heading above it, or its first word); shown here as “Tumours — (hot)”.
Modern reading: hot swellings. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with swelling OR tumor OR edema OR "anti-inflammatory". The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
A hot swelling. A tumour in Culpeper is any swelling of a part, and the hot kind is the one that is hot to the touch and is cooled from outside. Not a growth.
What the entries treat
3 claims: 3 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone. All three are cooling remedies laid on the place. Endive, applied outwardly, to “temper the sharp humours of fretting ulcers, hot tumours, swellings, and pestilential sores”; Pellitory of the Wall for “all other hot tumours and inflammations, or breakings-out, of heat, being bathed often with wet cloths dipped therein”; Water Lily’s oil of the flowers, made “as oil of Roses is made”, “to cool hot tumours, and to ease the pains, and help the sores”.
Where the word comes from
Middle English tumour, from Old French tumour, from Latin tumor, “swelling”, from tumeō “bulge, swell”; related to “thumb”, says Wiktionary.
Today’s words
inflamed swelling; inflammation (the heat, redness, swelling and pain of a part); hot swelling — a broad match: the heading covers more than this, or several modern things.
How it reads today
A false friend. “Tumour” today means a growth, usually with cancer in mind; in Culpeper a tumour is any swelling, and a hot one is what medicine calls inflammation. Latin tumor, swelling, is one of the four classical signs of inflammation (calor, dolor, rubor, tumor: heat, pain, redness, swelling), which Wikipedia says Celsus described. Nothing under this line is about cancer; the hard kind has its own line in the index, Tumours — (hard).
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “tumour” (accessed 2026-10-28): “From Middle English tumour, from Old French tumour, from Latin tumor (“swelling”), from tumeō (“bulge, swell”, verb)”; “Related to English thumb”; tumour is the Commonwealth spelling of tumor. Wiktionary, s.v. “tumor” (accessed 2026-10-28): “(oncology, pathology) An abnormal growth; differential diagnosis includes abscess, metaplasia, and neoplasia.” Wikipedia, “Inflammation” (accessed 2026-10-28): “The five cardinal signs are heat, pain, redness, swelling, and loss of function (Latin calor, dolor, rubor, tumor, and functio laesa)”; the first four “described by Celsus”.
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