Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Napellus
A plant with narcotic properties, with which Van Helmont experimented. He says that, having on one occasion roughly prepared the root, he tasted it with his tongue, and in a very short time found that the centre of thought and intellect was situated in the pit of his stomach. An unusual clarity and distinctness of thought rendered the experience a pleasant one, and he sought on future occasions to repeat it by the same means, but without success. After about two hours he felt a slight dizziness and thereupon thought in the normal fashion with his brain. But throughout the strange experience he was conscious that his soul still remained in the brain as a governing power.
Napper, Dr., of Sandford in Buckinghamshire, who, according to Lilly "outwent Forman in physic and holiness of life, cured the falling-sickness perfectly by constellated rings, and some diseases by amulets." He was probably of the stock of the Scottish Napiers though his family had been settled in England since Henry the Eighth's time.