Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
An Irish Materia Medica (Author: Tadhg Ó Cuinn)
subsection 12
12. Agaricus, fungus: i.e. the two names of the agaric; it is hot and dry in the first degree; what agaric is is a bracket fungus of a tree known as abies which grows in the territory of India; there are two species of it i.e. a masculine and a feminine. It is the feminine species that better serves for use in medicine, and this is how it is identified i.e. when the feminine species is broken, it breaks into smooth fibrous webs, and it is not like that when the masculine species is broken, but it becomes fine fragments; John, Son of Mesue, says that the agaric which is whitest and most easily broken is the best; it purges the phlegmatic humour principally, and the melancholic
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humour secondarily, and for that reason it serves well against terciana when it comes from the yellow and yolky choleric humour; it serves against the quotidian and quartan fevers that arise from inflammatory choler; it is also said to serve against colic and ileus, and against every pain that comes from viscous humours in the body internally. It opens the oppilations of the liver, the spleen, and the kidneys, as John, Son of Mesue says. It is usual to make use of agaric compounded in drinks, plasters, clarets and laxative medicines; sometimes agaric is boiled in wine to intensify the laxative medicines, and one dragma of it is enough to intensify the other medicines. Sometimes we boil it with the skin of the root of bog myrtle and with violets, and to take a drink of it before the paroxysm of the quotidian fever, and it will help with that fever immediately. Others give an ounce of it with three ounces of the juice of fennel and this will help with the fever we mentioned; mix the powder of it with honey and oil, and apply it as a clyster and it will help with stranguria and dysuria. Item, take the burnet saxifrage, boil it in wine, add the powder of agaric to that wine, and it will help with every disease of the urine and with pain occurring in the penis; John, Son of Mesue, says that its powder draws the broken bones out of wounds, it expels bad tissue, and puts good tissue into them, and it remedies the dry and wet ulcers that become nasty. Item, make a fine powder of it, temper it with juice of dodder and with oil, and apply it with fine cotton to the anus, and it will help with haemorrhoids and with all sorts of piles. Item, make a fine powder of it, put salt through it, scarify the type of skin disease known as morphea at the place where it occurs, shake the powder on it, and it will cure.
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Item, take an ounce of agaric, an ounce and a half of lemon grass, two dragmas of castorium, and half an ounce of senna, pound it finely, make pills of it with the juice of wormwood and of fennel, and it will cure the headache that arises from the stomach due to the phlegmatic humour.