Historical label: “Wind” 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
Gas in the stomach and bowels, to be broken, dissolved or expelled; the verbs tell the sense. Dill’s “the mother” is the womb, which the old physiology thought could fill with wind too.
What the entries treat
5 claims: 5 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone. The seed plants of the kitchen: Carraway seed “breaks wind and provokes urine”; Fennel “is good to break wind, to provoke urine, and ease the pains of the stone”; Bishop’s-weed “dissolves wind, and being taken in wine it eases pains and griping in the bowels”; Hemp seed “consumes wind, and by too much use thereof disperses it so much that it dries up the natural seed for procreation”. Dill is for women “troubled with the pains and windiness of the mother, if they sit therein”, the mother being the womb.
Today’s words
flatulence; gas; bloating; trapped wind; carminative (said of the plant: the old medical word for a wind-expelling remedy) — the modern term names the same thing.
How it reads today
Reads as it did: “wind” for gas is still said, and Wiktionary labels the sense colloquial. Caraway, fennel and dill are the seeds a reader knows from the kitchen. The one trap is Dill’s “windiness of the mother”: the mother is the womb, an obsolete sense Wiktionary records with Culpeper himself as a witness, and “the rising of the mother” was the old name for hysteria.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “wind” (accessed 2026-10-28): noun sense 8, “(uncountable, colloquial) Flatus”, example “to pass wind”. Wiktionary, s.v. “mother” (accessed 2026-10-28): noun sense 17, labelled obsolete, hysterical passion, hysteria, the uterus; quotations Shakespeare, King Lear (c. 1603–1606), “O how this mother swels vp toward my hart”, and Culpeper, The English Physitian Enlarged (1666), “helps the rising of the Mother”.
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
It digests humours, provokes urine and women’s courses, dissolves wind, and being taken in wine it eases pains and griping in the bowels, and is good against the biting of serpents;