Historical label: “Womb, (cold infirmities of)” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”. Shown as “Womb (cold infirmities of)”.
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
The womb’s “cold” diseases, in the humoral scheme that sorted an organ’s complaints by hot and cold and warmed the cold ones. With no sentence under the heading, what Culpeper counted as cold here cannot be read off it.
What the entries treat
1 claim: 0 with a sentence, 1 from the index alone. Bayberries, listed in the 1850 index (page 248) under a name the book has no herbal entry for; no sentence is on record, and what the index meant by a cold infirmity of the womb is not in this heading’s text.
Where the word comes from
Old English womb, wamb, glossed by Wiktionary as “belly, stomach; bowels; heart; womb; hollow”: the word meant the belly as well as the womb, and the senses “the abdomen or stomach” and “the stomach of a person or creature” are marked obsolete, in use to the 17th and 18th centuries. The Latin borrowings matris, matrice (our reading: the word behind Culpeper’s “matrix”) were once English too and were superseded.
Today’s words
(none; search aids only) uterus; womb; gynaecological complaints; menstrual pain — no modern condition corresponds; the words are search aids only.
How it reads today
No modern condition is a cold infirmity of the womb; the hot-and-cold sorting is the four humours, and the one index name has no sentence. The word itself has moved: in Old English “womb” meant the belly, and Wiktionary marks that sense obsolete. The index’s sub-lines, diseases and inflammations of the womb, have their own rows, and Women’s Diseases is the wider heading.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “womb” (accessed 2026-10-28): from Middle English wombe, wambe, from Old English womb, wamb “belly, stomach; bowels; heart; womb; hollow”, from Proto-Germanic *wambō “belly, stomach, abdomen”; sense 1 “(anatomy) In female mammals, the organ in which the young are conceived and grow until birth; the uterus”, from the 8th century; sense 2 “(obsolete) The abdomen or stomach”, 8th to 17th century, with Malory; sense 3 “(obsolete) The stomach of a person or creature”, 8th to 18th century; the etymology notes that Middle English matris, matrice, borrowed from Latin and Old French, were later superseded.
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.
1 claim: 0 with a sentence, 1 from the index alone