Herbal and Traditional Cure for Bleeding

As one of the most obvious domestic emergencies, bleeding has attracted a wide range of home remedies. In British folk medicine, the simplest treatment has been cold water. Cobwebs were very widely used right up to the end of the twentieth century to treat serious cuts in humans and animals. In the Highlands of Scotland so-called toadstones (actually the teeth of fossil fish) were used to arrest bleeding. Ashes of a burned frog were reputedly used to stop bleeding. Pepper has been used as a styptic in both Scotland and Northumberland. Also in the Highlands, individual healers had a reputation for treating bleeding, and their treatment included administering dried blood of the patient. Puffballs have been another source of emergency first aid. The spores have been sprinkled onto a wound to arrest bleeding, and the whole fungus has been chopped to provide a poultice. In barber shops and in farm sheds a dried puffball was kept throughout the year to use in emergencies. In Sussex, bracket fungus, known there as amadou, was used similarly.

A remedy common throughout Britain, but especially in Suffolk, was to preserve the petals of a lily (usually the Madonna lily) in brandy. The petals were then used to bandage cuts . Also in East Anglia, the root of the horseradish (Armoracia rusticana) was used to treat deep cuts Horsetail (Equisetum spp.) has been recommended by the ancients in official medicine but has also been used in folk medicine, for example on the Isle of Man, to stop bleeding. Plantain leaves were used to stem the bleeding from minor wounds, in Scotland, England, and Ireland. In Somerset, bird's foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) has been used to staunch bleeding. In the nineteenth century mistletoe (Viscum album) was reputedly chopped small and applied to injuries to stop the bleeding. The boiled plant of St. John's wort (Hypericum perforatum) was used in the Scottish Highlands to staunch bleeding, as were the leaves of tobacco or dried tobacco.

Shepherd's purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris) was used to staunch bleeding. Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) was universally accepted as a styptic and formed a constituent of many healing ointments. Willow (Salix spp.) was used in Cumbria to arrest bleeding. The blood-staunching properties of marsh woundwort (Stachys palustris) were drawn to Gerard's attention in the sixteenth century when he witnessed their effectiveness on a man badly cut by a scythe. Gerard was so impressed that he adopted the plant in his own practice. Both the marsh and the hedge woundwort (Stachys sylvatica) have been used in this way. Also in Sussex, the leaves of woad plants (Isatis tinctoria) naturalized from cultivation for dye, have been used to stem the flow of blood.

The resin from pine trees (Pinus spp.) has been used to staunch bleeding in both England and Scotland (Allen and Hatfield, in press). In the twentieth century, castor oil was used in Hampshire with great success to treat deep cuts. In North America amulets worn to stop bleeding have included pieces of bloodroot worn as a necklace. In Georgia, a necklace of mulberry roots and buttons has been used. As in Britain, certain individuals have been credited with the power to stop bleeding. A woman born with a caul was thought to have this ability, also the seventh son of a seventh son.

It is claimed that people who have never seen their fathers have this power too. When the injury has been caused by a knife, a widespread belief goes, the knife should be thrust into the ground or into a tree. Recommended applications in North American folk medicine for bleeding include cobwebs, pepper, tobacco (all used in Britain as well), tea leaves, ashes of burned rags, a paste (made from flour, salt, and water), and wood soot, as well as powdered bone and powdered dried beef. Powdered rice, coffee grounds, corn silk, urine, bread, sugar, the lining of an eggshell (Cannon 1984: 94), and bleeding chicken meat have all been applied to bleeding injuries. For arterial bleeding in an arm, thrusting the arm into a sack of flour has been found to help.

Applying brown paper, as in the nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill, has also been used to stem bleeding.The sap from a pine tree (Pinus elliottii) has been used in Florida to stem bleeding (as in Cumbria, England, where a different Pine species was used; see above). The sap of spruce trees (Picea sp.) has been used similarly. Wild alum root (Heuchera sp.) has been used in the mountain South of the United States to stop bleeding. A poultice of wolf's bane (Arnica sp.) was used in Mexico. Other plant remedies include sumac (Rhus sp.) , witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana), goldenrod (Solidago sp.), and bloodweed blossoms (Conyza canadensis). Plant-derived remedies also include puffball spores, woundwort, yarrow, and woad, as used in Britain. In addition, the leaves of sunflower (Helianthus annuus) or peach (Prunus persica), as well as sassafras leaves (Sassafras albidum), chewed fine and applied, are recommended. Matico-leaf (Piper angustifolium) and bistort (Polygonum bistorta) have been used, also the leaves and bark of willow, as in Britain (Salix spp.).

Green walnut juice (Juglans sp.) has been used in Tennessee (Parr 1962: 11). In Mexico, the organ pipe cactus (Pachycereus sp.) was particularly popular for healing cuts in the eighteenth century, and it is still used today to check bleeding after a tooth extraction. The crushed young leaves of Mexican elder (Sambucus mexicana) are used to poultice cuts. In Native American medicine, plants belonging to nearly a hundred different genera have been used to staunch bleeding. They include red willow (Salix lucida) (Wallis 1922: 26); wormwood leaves (Artemisia sp.), various species of juniper (for instance Juniperus occidentalis, used by the Paiute), and the chewed leaves of pigeon berries or poke (Phytolacca americana). Interestingly, both puffball spores and spider webs have been used-for example, by the Kwakiutl-to stem bleeding .