Artemisia
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Artemisia. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
wormwood; named after Artemis, the Greek goddess, corresponding to the Roman Diana. A genus of plants belonging to the order asteraceæ, or composites. It contains four British species, the A. campestris, or field southernwood; the A. vulgaris, or common mugwort; the A. absinthium, or common wormwood; and the A. maritima, or sea-wormwood. The common wormwood grows luxuriantly among the sage brush of the Rocky Mountain regions. ARTEMISIA I., daughter of Lygdamis, and Queen of Caria, who assisted Xerxes in person against the Greeks, and behaved with such valor that the Athenians offered a reward for her capture, and the Spartans erected a statue to her. Lived in the 5th century B. C. ARTEMISIA II., Queen of Caria, who erected so magnificent a monument to the memory of her husband Mausolus, that every splendid structure of this kind has been since styled a mausoleum. Lived in the 4th century B. C.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a genus of acrid, bitter, composite plants, so named by Linnaeus. The genus is named for Artemisia, the queen of Caria, who built the famous Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The worm-wood, the southernwood or oldman, the mugwort, and the sage bushes of the alkaline plains are all related species. An exceedingly bitter, greenish, highly aromatic French liqueur, called absinthe, is produced by steeping wormwood in alcohol and then redistilling. Its excessive use produces vertigo and epilepsy. An alpine artemisia furnishes a yellow dye. The distillation of wormwood oil is carried on in several states of the Union, notably New York , Michigan, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. The shrub is cultivated in rows like corn. The shoots are cut for distillation several seasons in succession. The oil is a dark greenish heavy oil. The yield does not exceed ten pounds of oil to the acre. See Absinthe ; Sagebrush
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
Daughter of Hecatomnus, and sister, wife, and successor of the Carian prince Mausolus , reigned B. c. 352-350. She is renowned in history for her extraordinary grief at the death of her husband Mausolus. She is said to have mixed his ashes in her daily drink; and to perpetuate his memory she built at Halicarnassus the celebrated monument, Mausoleum, which was regarded as one of the seven wonders of the world , and whose name subsequently became the generic term for any splendid sepulchral monument.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 entry treats the genus mainly as a source of bitters and dye, warning that absinthe's "excessive use produces vertigo and epilepsy" — a fear that helped drive bans on the drink in Switzerland, France and the United States before 1915; most of those bans were lifted in the 1990s and 2000s once thujone limits were set. What none of these accounts could know is that the same bitter genus would yield one of the great drugs of the century: artemisinin, isolated from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) by Tu Youyou's team in 1972 from a fourth-century Chinese recipe, is now the backbone of frontline malaria treatment, and Tu shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for it. The two Carian queens stand as described, though the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus is no longer only a name from Pliny — its sculptures were excavated in the 1850s and are in the British Museum, and the site itself has been dug in modern times.
Written for this edition, 2026.