Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
An Irish Materia Medica (Author: Tadhg Ó Cuinn)

subsection 31

31. Aillium: i.e. garlic; it is hot and dry in the middle of the fourth degree, according to Platearius; if raw garlic be put on the wounds caused by a mad dog, it will help them. Pound the garlic, cook it in milk, and drink it in small mouthfulls, and it will help illness of the lungs that comes from coldness; it is appropriate against the cold dropsy and disease of the kidneys, and headache, that come from coldness. If the garlic be powdered finely with lard of goose through it, and a small quantity of the juice be put warm in the ear, it will help with earache that comes from coldness. If garlic be boiled in fresh butter, it will help with asthma and illness of the chest that comes from coldness. If a poultice of garlic and pig lard be put on the anus, it will help with tenesmus and pain of the anus, and the same poultice is appropriate against every swelling that comes from coldness. Take garlic fasting in the times of the corrupt air; it serves well to put garlic on a painful tooth, and it will help with the pain if it comes from coldness. The constant use of garlic dries the intestines and the stomach, and gives rise to skin ailments, mania and phrenitis, it weakens the sight and is greatly injurious to

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choleric people, though it is appropriate for phlegmatic people and for people with illnesses of coldness, because it has the virtue of dissolving and consuming the wet humours; it expels every poison, and is called by the old people "the poor man's theriac". Item, take salt, honey, kernels of hazel nuts, and garlic, in equal amounts, mix them, and put a poultice of this on the bite of a mad dog; it will help with it, and the poison will not revive afterwards; if the same compound be put in wounds, it will save them from every badness, and from festering and ulcerating. If garlic be pounded cold and rubbed on a scabby head, or on a rash or on morphew, it will clean them. If powder of garlic be burnt and put in dirty unbeatable wounds, it will heal them; if garlic be pounded and taken regularly, it will help with roughness of the voice which breaks from coldness. Item, take garlic, pepper, parsley, masterwort, juice of mint, and vinegar, mix them together, consume them, and they will help with worms, and they will open the oppilation of the liver and spleen, and serve against stranguria and dysuria. Cloves of garlic, cleaned and placed in the vagina, provoke menstruation, as Constantine says; or, if the garlic be boiled in water, and the woman immersed in it up to her navel, it will provoke menstruation. If garlic be taken fasting, water will not harm you that day. If it be taken before going to sea, sea-sickness will not harm you that day. If it be boiled in wine and drunken, it will help with jaundice, as Macer says. If taken like that, it will soften the hardness of the abdomen. Plague or poison will not harm you the day you take it fasting.

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