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

subsection 36

36. Apum domisdicum: i.e. the garden celery; this herb is said to be hot and dry in the third degree. Platearius says that its seed is better for medicine than the herb itself; it serves well as a plaster for the eyes together with the flour of white bread with the juice of this herb through it, and it serves likewise for a woman's breast. Item, take the leaves of this herb, and rub them on the back of the head of the person who has lithariga, and put the juice of it in the same person's nose, and it will relieve him. Item, against the swelling and pain of the entrance to the stomach, boil the roots of celery in white wine, drink it, and it will cure it; if celery be put by itself on a wound, it will not go bad afterwards. Item, if the seed of this herb be boiled in vinegar, it will prevent vomiting that comes from the cold matter of the phlegmatic humour. Item, Rhases says people who have a bad appearance after illness, if raw celery be given to them to eat, they will revert to their own appearance again.


p.478

Item, pound the same herb, rub it in water, and it will help with quotidian fever; the same man says if the juice of celery and of fennel, the same amount of both juices, be taken, and given to drink to the person who has dropsy, it will cure him. Item, take the juice of celery and starch and white of egg and honey, mix them and put them in the wounds, and it will clean them and make them better. Note that there are several kinds of celery, apium ranarum or the celery of the frogs, apium risus or the celery of laughter, and this relieves the spleen, as it expels the melancholic humour from it, and this is the cause of laughter, and apium haemorrhoidarum, which is suitable for piles. Platearius says that pregnant women should not make a practice of eating celery, because it causes the membranes that surround the foetus to slip and move, so causing miscarriage; if they eat it, putrid abscesses occur on the babies. A nursing woman should avoid eating it or touching it, in case the baby should become epileptic, because in babyhood there is much wetness, little heat, weakness of virtue, and closing of pores, and these are the causes that prepare a person for epilepsy.