Historical label: “Women’s Diseases” in the 1850 edition’s “A List of the Principal Diseases”.
Modern reading: women's complaints. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with menstrual OR dysmenorrhea OR gynecolog* OR menstruation OR menopause. The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
The complaints of women as a class, meaning the womb (“the mother”) and the “secret parts”: a department rather than a diagnosis. The particular complaints have their own headings, the Womb lines, in Labour, Menses.
What the entries treat
5 claims: 3 with a sentence, 2 from the index alone. Dog Mercury: “Hippocrates commended it wonderfully for women’s diseases, and applied to the secret parts, to ease the pains of the mother”; Mugwort, “an herb of Venus”, which “remedies the diseases of the parts that are under her signs, Taurus and Libra”; the Dwarf-Elder, in a long list, “in helping the gout, piles, and women’s diseases”. French and Dog Mercury (page 116) and Mosses (page 120) are index names with no sentence naming it.
Today’s words
gynaecological conditions; women’s health; menstrual and uterine complaints — a broad match: the heading covers more than this, or several modern things.
How it reads today
“Women’s diseases” has become “women’s health” or gynaecology, and no single modern condition answers to it. Mugwort’s sentence is a reason rather than a use, Venus’s rule over Taurus and Libra, which is Culpeper’s astrology, kept apart from the sentence’s claim; Hippocrates is Dog Mercury’s authority, and a use follows it. “The pains of the mother” are pains of the womb: “mother” for womb is an obsolete sense Wiktionary records with Culpeper himself as a witness.
References
Wiktionary, s.v. “mother” (accessed 2026-10-28): noun sense 17, labelled obsolete, hysterical passion, hysteria, the uterus; quotation from 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: 3 with a sentence, 2 from the index alone
MugwortArtemisia vulgarisCLM-0024651850 index, pp. 122, 231
This is an herb of Venus, therefore maintains the parts of the body she rules, remedies the diseases of the parts that are under her signs, Taurus and Libra.
in helping the gout, piles, and women’s diseases, colours the hair black, helps the inflammations of the eyes, and pains in the ears, the biting of serpents, or mad dogs, burnings and scaldings, the wind cholic, cholic, and stone, the difficulty of urine, the cure of old sores and fistulous ulcers.