Historical label: “Wens” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”.
Modern literature has not yet been searched for this heading’s claims: it comes only from the 1850 index and has no search words yet.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
A wen is a lump under the skin, a cyst, named with warts and “kernels” (hard lumps in the flesh) as things to be rubbed away.
What the entries treat
2 claims: 2 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone, both shared with Warts. The Fuller’s Thistle, or Teasle, by Dioscorides’s account a salve of the root that “takes away warts and wens”; Turnsole, seed and juice “rubbed with a little salt upon warts and wens, and other kernels in the face, eye-lids, or any other part of the body, will, by often using, take them away”.
Where the word comes from
Old English wenn, wænn; Wiktionary’s quotations run from Swift (1726) to the present.
Today’s words
sebaceous cyst (an epidermoid or pilar cyst); skin lump; kernel (Culpeper’s word for a hard lump) — a broad match: the heading covers more than this, or several modern things.
How it reads today
“Wen” named a cyst under the skin, what people still call a sebaceous cyst, a term Wikipedia says is used in practice for epidermoid and pilar cysts. Turnsole’s “kernels” are, in Wiktionary’s words, “a concretion or hard lump in the flesh”. Nothing in the two sentences says what any of them were.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “wen” (accessed 2026-10-28): etymology 1, “From Middle English wen, wenne, from Old English wenn, wænn (“wen”)”; sense “A cyst on the skin; a tumor or wart”; quotations dated 1726 (Swift), 1854 (Thoreau), 1973, 1996 and 1999. Wiktionary, s.v. “kernel” (accessed 2026-10-28): sense 6, “A small mass around which other matter is concreted; a nucleus; a concretion or hard lump in the flesh”. Wikipedia, “Sebaceous cyst” (accessed 2026-10-28): “the term is still often used for epidermoid and pilar cysts”.
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.
2 claims: 2 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone
Dioscorides saith, That the root bruised and boiled in wine, till it be thick, and kept in a brazen vessel, and after spread as a salve, and applied to the fundament, doth heal the cleft thereof, cankers and fistulas therein, also takes away warts and wens.
the seed and juice of the leaves also being rubbed with a little salt upon warts and wens, and other kernels in the face, eye-lids, or any other part of the body, will, by often using, take them away.