Somebody sent us a picture this week. A mullein leaf on one side, a human lung on the other, the veining lined up. Then another one, a sweet gum ball next to the drawing of a virus everybody has seen for the last few years, both of them balls covered in spikes.
Truth is, I always took the doctrine of signatures to be how they knew. The more I look at it the more it runs the other way. It is not how they found out but how they made sure what they found out got down to the next one. The finding out came from taste, from watching animals, and from seeing how people fared afterward. That is the tradition our grandmothers were carrying, and the likeness was just what carried it.
There is a name for this. The doctrine of signatures, a few hundred years old, the idea that a plant carries a sign of what it is for. Paracelsus wrote it up in the early 1500s. William Coles said it best in the 1650s, that God gave herbs signatures whereby a man may read the use. If you have spent any time around herbs you have met the idea even if nobody named it for you. Walnut for the head. Lungwort for the lungs, off the spots on its leaves.
So I went and looked, because I wanted to know whether the mullein version was old or new.
It is new. That surprised me.
Grieve's Modern Herbal is where you go for this kind of thing, and it explains mullein's long run in chest complaints by what the leaf does, soothing and coating, nothing about what it looks like. Not a word about lungs or veining. What it does have is Coles again, in 1657, writing down that the husbandmen of Kent gave mullein to their cattle against the cough of the lungs.
Sit with that for a second. Coles is the signatures man. That is his whole idea. And when he gets to mullein he is writing down what farmers in Kent did with their cows, because that is what was in front of him.
The old country names for mullein are Clown's Lungwort, or in our parts cowboy toilet paper, which completely discards the medicinal side. I had always half assumed the lungwort part came from the leaf looking the way it does. It did not. It came from what people used it for. Real Lungwort, the Pulmonaria, got its name the other way round, off the spotted leaves. Mullein borrowed the word.
Which means the order is backwards from how the pretty picture tells it. Nobody looked at a mullein leaf and worked out what to do with it. People used it, for a long time, on themselves and on their animals, and the resemblance got noticed later and turned out to be a handy thing to remember it by.
The sweet gum one is easier to settle. It cannot be a signature at all. Coles died a long time before anybody knew a virus existed. You cannot read a seed pod as the sign of a thing nobody has any idea is there. Somebody made that picture in the last few years and it traveled, which is fine, that is what pictures do. It just is not old and it is not evidence. What we know about those green pods is what is inside them, and we did not learn it by looking at the outside.
Here is what I keep thinking about, out when we are cutting leaf.
If you want to know what the old timers were reading, it was never the shape. Chew a mullein leaf sometime. It goes slick in your mouth, coating, a little like okra. That is the mucilage, and that slickness is why the plant ever got near a cough in the first place. Grieve writes demulcent and emollient, which is the book way of saying what your tongue tells you in about four seconds. A grandmother in 1600 could not spell mucilage and did not need to. She could taste it.
So there was a signature all along. It was one you taste rather than one you look at, and it had been sitting there the whole time under a doctrine that told everybody to use their eyes.
That is the thing I think about in the field. Everything I know about these plants I know because my grandmother paid attention over a long stretch of time and handed it on, not because a leaf looked like something.
Our people came down the Three Notch Trail out of South Carolina and north Georgia. My great grandmother knew things about plants. I could not tell you which of it came from where or who taught her, and I think that is the ordinary shape of it. Two generations is about all it takes for a thing like that to go cold.
I do like the leaf beside the lung, though, and I am going to keep the picture. Say what you want about the doctrine, it worked. It got what people knew down to the ones who came after, and some of it got as far as me.
We put the long version on a page in the Learning Center, with how people worked these plants out in the first place, who wrote the doctrine down, and the one case where reading a plant by its shape did real harm. The doctrine of signatures, and how the old timers really knew
If you want the plants themselves, the mullein is here and the sweet gum is here.
Proud member of Sweet Grown Alabama
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