Monday, September 7, 2009

Wildflowers of Ainsworth: White Boneset

WhiteBoneset
(Click on image to enlarge)

I wondered why it's called "boneset," and a little Googling turned up a few theories. The innvista website states:
Many discussions have been held as to how boneset received its name, and all have some validity. One suggests that the common name for dengue fever, breakbone fever, was Eupatorium. Another suggests that flus and colds were historically called "breakbone fever" in the early colonies. The third speculation insists that the traditional use of boneset by indigenous peoples to heal broken bones is the reason for its name.
Jack Sanders, in The Secrets of Wildflowers: A Delightful Feast of Little-Known Facts, Folklore, and History (Guilford: The Lyons Press, 2003), gives as one theory that dengue fever caused pain so severe that patients thought their bones broken, and "[p]erhaps as a consequence, the plant that relieved the pain was called boneset."

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