A heading of ours (added October 2026), not the 1850 index’s. It holds sentences the index would have filed under “Worms”, read for direction: here Culpeper says the plant causes or harms, or the index heading did not fit.
Modern reading: worms. Searched in PubMed as each plant’s Latin name with anthelmintic OR helminth OR nematode OR "intestinal parasites" OR antiparasitic. The counts and papers are on the Concordance page.
A note on the heading
Plain sense
Foods said to breed worms: raw fruit and unripe grain making “crudities”, which Wiktionary glosses as undigested food in the stomach and badly-concocted humours, from which worms were thought to come. Humoral physiology throughout.
What the entries treat
2 claims: 2 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone: two warnings a keyword search had filed under Worms and the verb pass (2026-10-26) moved here. Gooseberries, “they are supposed to breed crudities, and by crudities, worms”; green Wheat, by Dioscorides, “to eat the corn of green Wheat is hurtful to the stomach, and breeds worms”.
(none; search aids only) worms; gooseberries; green wheat; indigestion — no modern condition corresponds; the words are search aids only.
How it reads today
No modern condition: worms are an infection, in Wikipedia’s word, not something a food breeds, and the “crudities” belong to the old physiology of digestion. A heading of ours, from the verb pass: the index would have filed these two under Worms as if they were remedies, so a reader looking for help would have found its opposite. The word is under CND-0160.
References
see CND-0160. Wiktionary, s.v. “crudity” (accessed 2026-10-28): “Borrowed from Middle French crudité, from Latin crūditās”; sense 3 “(obsolete, medicine) Indigestion; undigested food in the stomach; badly-concocted humours”, with Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), “will ingender crudity, and doe much harme”.
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.
This heading is ours. A keyword search had filed these under “Worms”, but in each sentence Culpeper says the plant breeds worms. They are listed so his words stay on record, not as a remedy.
2 claims: 2 with a sentence, 0 from the index alone