Historical label: “Vomit” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”.
Modern reading: provoking vomiting. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with emetic OR vomiting. The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
A vomit, in the old noun, is a medicine given to make a person vomit, and the heading lists the plants that do it. Vomiting was a treatment, emptying the stomach upward as a purge empties it downward.
What the entries treat
7 claims: 6 with a sentence, 1 from the index alone. The opposite of the next heading: plants that make the patient vomit on purpose. Asarabacca, where “the finer powder provokes vomits and urine, and the coarser purgeth downwards”; Broom “provokes strong vomits”; the Black Alder-tree’s “fresh green bark taken inwardly provokes strong vomitings, pains in the stomach, and gripings in the belly”; the Dwarf-Elder’s root juice “doth mightily procure vomitings, and purges the watery humours of the dropsy”; the Peach Tree’s syrup “provokes vomiting, and spends waterish and hydropic humours”; Groundsel “causes vomiting if the stomach be afflicted”. Antimonial Wine is in the index (page 292) under a name the book has no entry for.
Where the word comes from
Latin vomitāre, “vomit repeatedly”, from vomō “be sick, vomit”, through Middle English vomiten. The noun sense Culpeper’s index uses, “that which causes vomiting; an emetic”, Wiktionary marks obsolete, with Shakespeare’s Othello for it.
Today’s words
emetic (a medicine that causes vomiting); induced vomiting — the modern term names the same thing.
How it reads today
A false friend by direction. A reader searching “vomit” wants to stop it; this heading is for causing it. Medicine’s word for such a plant is emetic. Our reading: Groundsel’s sentence is an effect noted, not a use. Antimonial Wine, the index’s one non-plant, has no entry in the book.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “vomit” (accessed 2026-10-28): “From Middle English vomiten, from Latin vomitāre (“vomit repeatedly”)”, frequentative of vomō “be sick, vomit”; noun sense 5 “(obsolete, countable) That which causes vomiting; an emetic”, with Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603–1604), “He gives your Hollander a vomit”.
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.
7 claims: 6 with a sentence, 1 from the index alone
it also provokes strong vomits, and helps the pains of the sides, and swelling of the spleen, cleanses also the reins or kidneys and bladder of the stone, provokes urine abundantly, and hinders the growing again of the stone in the body.
A syrup made of them, as the syrup of roses is made, works more forcibly than that of roses, for it provokes vomiting, and spends waterish and hydropic humours by the continuance thereof.