Healing plants of post famine Ireland

As part of a study in the medical humanities we have we have investigated 10% of the entries in the Irish National Folklore Collection of Ireland (NFC), accessed at Dúchas.ie, for entries which give detail on the use of healing plants in 1930’s, post famine Ireland. The NFC is an early example of citizen science where school children collected information form elders in their communities related to Irish cultural practice, over a range of areas, including healing plants and ethnphrmacology [1]. Schools from 26 counties in the newly formed Republic of Ireland contributed to the collection. In this study 10% of the schools in each county were selected, and the data that they submitted to the collection was systematically read and analysed, and entries related to herbs, wells, cures, and piseóg (superstition; a category which on examination housed descriptions of healing plants) were collected. The retreived sample set (6560) included cures derived from plants (2,967), animals (1710) and minerals (744). There were also details given across regions for the use of compound mixtures, mainly as poultices for topical application. The top ten healing plants were Dandelion (warts, heart disease, TB etc), Nettle (measles, jaundice), Dock (nettle stings), Gooseberry (thorns for eye stys), Plantain (staunch bleeding), tea (headache, eye pain), potato (warts, burns, whitlows), wild garlic (coughs and colds), common chickweed (swelling), and mallow (sprains/swellings) / comfrey (wounds, sprains). Some of the entries have detail relating to season for harvesting the plant material, plant part used, preparation of the treatment and duration of administration. The main treatments were used for skin conditions.

Publication History

Article published online:
13 December 2021

• References

• 1 Koay A, Shannon F, Sasse A, Heinrich M, Sheridan H. Frontiers in pharmacology 11, 1670
• 2 Shannon F, Sasse A, Sheridan H, Heinrich M. Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine 13 (1), 1-19