Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Walnut
Teutonic for "stranger." The tree was a native of Asia Minor, but is grown freely in England. "As for the timber," said Fuller, "it may be termed the English Shittim wood." The London Society of Apothecaries has directed that the unripe fruit of the Walnut shall be used pharmaceutically armaceutically on account of its worm-expelling virtues: on the adoption of which ordinance, for certain, in the immortal words of Mrs. Gamp, "Lambs would not forgive, nor worms forget." It is remarkable that no insects will prey on the leaves of this tree, which yield a brown dye, supposed to contain iodine, such being used by gipsies for staining their skin. Nucin, or juglon, is the active chemical principle of the several parts of the tree, and its fruit. M. Negrier, and others, have treated scrofulous children very successfully with infusion of fresh leaves from Walnut trees in England. Each patient took two or three cupfuls of this infusion, sweetened with honey, daily, also some of the expressed leaf juice thickened by evaporation to the consistence of an extract, and made into small pills. Sores (of glands,) ulcers, swelling and caries of bones, and strumously inflamed eyes, were all washed with a strong decoction of the leaves, and then kept covered with lint wetted in the infusion. This treatment was chiefly pursued in the spring. After two months, half the number of children were cured, and after six months all were perfectly well. About four grains of the extract were contained in each pill, two to four pills being given every day. The decoction for outward use is to be made by boiling a handful of the fresh bruised leaves for fifteen minutes in a quart of water, and straining this when cool. The whole fruit, when young and unripe, makes a wholesome, tender, anti-scorbutic pickle, which is slightly laxative. "The bagman's uncle (see Pickwick) was once pitched out of his gig, and knocked head first against a milestone. There he lay, stunned, and so cut about the face with some gravel that his own mother wouldn't have known him. After he was picked up, and had been bled, he jumped up in bed, and demanded a mutton chop, and a pickled walnut, instantly. He was very fond of pickled walnuts, and said he always found that, taken without vinegar, they relished the beer." 66 Some physicians are in favour at present of giving walnutsa dozen a day at least to gouty patients, and for chronic rheumatism; the nuts have to be well masticated. It is found that admirable results are produced, swellings go down, and pain decreases. Preserved Walnuts serve for obviating constipation, one of these being sufficiently laxative for a child. Allow half a pound of sugar to each score of green Walnuts. Pierce the nuts with a needle, and put them into a stone jar, with the sugar. Stand the jar in a deep saucepan of boiling water, and allow the contents to continue boiling steadily for three hours, taking care that none of the water gets into the jar; the sugar being dissolved should cover the walnuts. When done tie them down, and in six months the preserve will be ready for use. Walnut leaves are of notable benefit for helping to cure secondary sores, even when otherwise obstinate; these sores should be coated with sugar saturated with a strong decoction of the bruised fresh leaves, and must be well cleansed between the times of thus dressing them.
Walnut catsup embodies the medicinal virtues of the unripe nuts, and will help their curative purposes, if used as a condiment at table. To make this, the unripe nuts, before their shells harden, are beaten to a pulp, and the juice is then separated by straining; salt, vinegar and spices are added, and the whole is gently boiled. The leaves of the American Black Walnut tree, which grows naturally in Virginia, are of the highest curative value for treating scrofulous sores, and eruptions on the skin. Chronic indolent ulcers have been healed by them after every other tried application had failed. An ounce of the fresh leaves (or rather less of the dried leaves) should be infused in twelve ounces of boiling water, to stand for six hours, and then to be strained off. A small wineglassful of the infusion to be taken three times a day, and the sore places to be dressed with linen soaked in another such infusion, but made of double strength. Or, an extract may be made from a strong decoction of the leaves, slowly reduced to a proper thick consistence, four grains thereof rolled into a small bolus each night and morning. The Virginian Walnuts are twice as large as those grown in England, being more rank and oily, with a thick, hard, adherent shell, so that "they come not clear of the husk as the Walnut in France doth." Pepys, on September 29th (Lord's-day, 1660), at the Hope Tavern, with Mr. Chaplin, and two other friends, did drink off two or three quarts of wine, and did eat about two hundred walnuts." In Flanders, against ague, the sick person catches a large black spider, and imprisons it between the two halves of a Walnutshell, then wearing it round the neck.
This is a materia medica entry with two food preparations embedded in it: a sugar preserve of green walnuts and a sketch of walnut catsup. Neither can be followed as printed, and the medicinal instructions around them should be read only as history.
- The preserve is an unsafe canning methodHalf a pound of sugar to a score (twenty) of green walnuts falls well short of the sugar concentration a preserve relies on; the result is a low-acid, wet pack. Heating it in a stone jar set in boiling water cannot exceed 100C, which does not destroy Clostridium botulinum spores, and the recipe then calls for it to be tied down and held six months before use. That combination is exactly the one modern preserving rules exist to prevent.
- No measured temperature or acidity anywhereThe original gives no vinegar, no salt ratio, no headspace, no jar sterilisation and no test for a seal. Traditional English pickled walnuts are brined and then packed in strong spiced vinegar for a reason. If you want to put up green walnuts, use a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority rather than this one.
- The catsup is a description, not a formula"Salt, vinegar and spices are added, and the whole is gently boiled" gives no proportions at all. Walnut ketchup historically relies on a heavy salt cure of the crushed green nuts over days or weeks, then vinegar; without those quantities the instruction is unusable as well as unsafe.
- Do not take any of the internal medicineThe leaf infusions, the evaporated leaf extract, and the four-grain pills (a grain is about 65 mg) are prescribed here for scrofula, which is tuberculosis of the lymph nodes. They do nothing for it. Black walnut leaf and hull preparations contain juglone and tannins and are not a self-dosing material.
- Juglone and the "iodine" claimThe brown stain in walnut leaves and hulls comes largely from juglone, the compound the text calls nucin or juglon, together with tannins and its oxidation products. It contains no iodine; that guess belongs to nineteenth-century chemistry. Juglone is also the substance implicated in walnut trees suppressing nearby plants, and it stains skin and cloth persistently.
- Archaic units in the textA score is twenty, a grain roughly 65 mg, a wineglassful conventionally about two fluid ounces, and the "twelve ounces of boiling water" is a fluid measure, one and a half cups. These are given for reading, not for use.
- What is not a recipe hereThe gouty patients eating a dozen walnuts a day, the Flanders charm of a spider sealed in a walnut shell, and Pepys's two hundred walnuts are anecdote and folklore. Only the preserve and the catsup describe making anything for the table -- the leaf decoction and infusions are medicinal preparations -- and both fail on safety grounds.
This comes from W. T. Fernie, who wrote several volumes in a late-Victorian genre that treated the greengrocer's stock as a dispensary and cited Fuller, Pepys and Dickens as readily as physicians. The etymology it offers is roughly right: walnut derives from Old English wealh, foreign or Welsh, the "foreign nut" as distinct from the native hazel, since Juglans regia reached northern Europe from Persia and Asia Minor by way of Rome. Green walnuts picked before the shell hardens have a long and genuine place in English cookery as pickles and as walnut ketchup, a sharp black condiment for meat and fish; the pickled walnut Dickens's bagman's uncle demands was ordinary tavern food. The medical claims are another matter. Walnut leaf decoctions for scrofulous sores were widely reported in French and English practice in the mid-nineteenth century, M. Negrier's Angers cases among them, but tuberculous glands often remit on their own, which is a likelier explanation of his cures than the leaves. The persistent enthusiasm for walnuts as brain and nerve medicine is generally traced to the doctrine of signatures, the kernel resembling the convoluted brain within its bony shell.