Chamomile

A dose of camomile tea

Dunkeld, Scotland, 4 September 1893. Beatrix Potter cannot think what to write.¹

She is twenty-seven and on holiday, and the letter is for Noel Moore, the five-year-old son of her former governess. Noel is getting over an illness. "I don't know what to write to you," she begins, "so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits."¹

Old Mrs Bunny tells her children they may go into the field or down the lane, "but don't go into Mr McGregor's garden". Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail are good little rabbits, and they go down the lane to gather blackberries. Peter is very naughty.¹

By page seven Mr McGregor has hung up Peter's little jacket and shoes as a scarecrow, to frighten the blackbirds. "Peter was ill during the evening, in consequence of over eating himself. His mother put him to bed and gave him a dose of camomile tea." The three good rabbits have bread and milk and blackberries for supper.¹

Publishers turned the story down, so in December 1901 Potter printed 200 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit herself. Then Frederick Warne took it on, and by the end of 1902 the firm had printed 28,000. On the way the tale grew darker. Peter's father, the book now said, "had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor." The camomile tea stayed.^{1, 2}

Long before Peter's dose, chamomile had been a garland, a cure, a charm, a joke and a crop. Its name began with an apple.

An apple on the ground

The Greeks called it chamaimelon, the earth-apple. In the first century AD Dioscorides wrote a Greek book of medicines that shaped Europe's herbal medicine. The plant earned its name, he says, because it smells like apples.^{3, 4, 5}

He knew three kinds, with round heads and golden middles, ringed with petals that were white, yellow or purple. They grew in rough places and beside the roads. The Roman writer Pliny adds that people picked it in spring to make garlands.^{4, 6}

A century later Galen, doctor to the emperor Marcus Aurelius, likened it to the rose, only warmer. In his pages it eased pain, loosened what was tight and softened what was hard, and for weariness it was as good as anything.^{7, 8}

He also passed on what the wisest men of Egypt believed about it, and said plainly that they were wrong.

Have in mind, thou maythen

In England the earth-apple had a name of its own. An Old English herbal calls it maythe, and for sore eyes it tells you to pick it before the sun comes up.^{9, 10}

In a book of cures copied early in the eleventh century, a healer sings to nine herbs. Mugwort is told to remember. Waybroad, which grows by the wayside, is praised because carts creaked over it, queens rode over it, brides and bulls went over it, and it withstood them all. Later the song turns to maythen.^{11, 12}

"Have in mind, thou maythen," it goes, "what thou accomplishedst at Alderford," so that no man ever died of a "flying ill" once maythen went into his medicine. What happened at Alderford, the charm never says. Oswald Cockayne, the Victorian clergyman who translated it, could only call the allusion dark and point to a place of that name in Norfolk. He took the flying ill for an infection, a disease "flying from one to another".¹²

In the same song the god Woden takes up nine wondrous twigs and strikes a serpent until it flies into nine bits. A few lines later the Lord in heaven forms the herbs. The healer sang the charm three times over each herb before working them up. Then he sang it into the sick man's mouth, into both his ears and into the wound, before the salve went on.^{12, 13}

The more it is trodden

In 1551 the English doctor William Turner found chamomile scarce in Germany. In England it was so plentiful, he wrote in his New Herball, that it grew wild on Richmond Green and Brentford Green, "and in mooste plenty of al, in hunsley hethe."¹⁴

Tread on it and it only spreads, or so the Elizabethans said. In 1579 a young writer, John Lyly, leapt into fame with a novel called Euphues, written in a style built on balanced comparisons. One of them ran, "though the Camomill the more it is troden and pressed downe, the more it spreadeth, yet the Violet the oftner it is handeled and touched, the sooner it withereth and decayeth."^{15, 16}

Shakespeare took the line and made it a joke. In Henry IV, Part 1, printed in 1598, Falstaff plays the King in a tavern in Eastcheap, with a cushion for his crown. Prince Hal plays himself. "For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows," Falstaff tells the prince, "so youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears." The Hostess calls it "excellent sport".^{17, 18}

Three centuries later a scholar judged that Shakespeare had caught Lyly's style perfectly, and "accurately caricatured its vapid artificiality".¹⁶

In 1652 Nicholas Culpeper, "Student in Physick and Astrologie", promised readers they could cure themselves for three pence, with herbs that grow in England. He found chamomile so well known "that it is but lost time and labor to describe it". He vouched for one wonder he had seen tried. A stone taken out of a man's body, wrapped in chamomile, would dissolve, "and in a little time too".¹⁹

A blue oil from Mitcham

By the 1860s chamomile was a London crop. At Mitcham, near the city, about 55 acres grew it in 1864. The flowers were carefully gathered and dried by artificial heat. They sold for about £9 a hundredweight, when foreign chamomile fetched £3 or £4.²⁰

The crop went by a foreign name, Roman chamomile, though the plant grew wild on the commons around London. The name was already old. German apothecaries used it in Turner's day, and in 1598 Joachim Camerarius linked it to Rome, where he had seen the plant growing in plenty.^{14, 20}

Distilled, chamomile gives an oil that is pale blue at first and turns brown within months. In 1863 Septimus Piesse, author of The Art of Perfumery, went after the colour. He distilled the blue oil over and over until it was pure, and found that even its vapour was blue.^{20, 21, 22}

"I have named this substance Azulene," he told the Chemical Society, "from azure, blue." He found it in wormwood, patchouli and bergamot as well. Less than one per cent of it was enough to turn chamomile's famous oil blue.^{21, 22}

The flower in the maze

In 1995 a team in Buenos Aires took apart a water extract of the flowers. They found apigenin, a compound that clung to the same brain receptor as the benzodiazepine drugs. It made mice less anxious on a raised maze.²³

In 2009 a team in Philadelphia ran what it called the first controlled clinical trial of chamomile extract for generalised anxiety disorder, with 57 patients over eight weeks. What it found is in the Research tab, with the trials that followed.^{24, 25}

The sun god's flower

An encyclopedia of alternative medicine gives Egypt one line in its chamomile entry. The Egyptians "valued the herb as a cure for malaria" and dedicated it "to their sun god, Ra." The entry names no source for either.²⁶

Go back to 1931 and A Modern Herbal by Mrs M. Grieve. Her Egyptians dedicated chamomile "to their gods", because they believed it cured ague, an old word for fever. Later in the entry she quoted William Turner, splicing in his lines about a different flower. Her quotation stops at the Egyptians' "only remedy of all agues".²⁷

Turner's next sentence is missing. In 1551 he had written that the wise men of Egypt consecrated chamomile "vnto the sonne" and reckoned it the only remedy of all agues. "But in that they were deceyued," he went on, because it healed only some fevers.¹⁴

Culpeper told the story in 1652, and he named a source. "Nichessor saith the Egyptians dedicated it to the Sun becaus it cured Agues; and they were like enough to do it, for they were the arrantest Apes in their Religion that ever I red of."¹⁹

Nichessor is Nechepso, a pharaoh half history and half legend, whose name was put on a much-quoted astrology book of about 150 BC. In the sixth century the Byzantine doctor Aetius did quote "Nechepso the Egyptian" on chamomile. But Nechepso gave a recipe. Gather the flowers at their peak, make them into lozenges and dry them in the shade. For any fever, grind one into oil and rub it over the patient from head to foot. Those who were going to live would break into a good sweat. Nothing about the sun.^{28, 29, 30}

The sun comes from Galen, whom Turner had followed line by line. In the second century AD Galen wrote that because chamomile cured fevers, the wisest of the Egyptians had dedicated it to the sun and thought it cured every fever. "But in this," he added, "they are not telling the truth." Galen named no wise man, no temple and no book. There the trail ends.^{7, 8, 14}

Eighteen centuries later, the sun god has a name and the fevers have become malaria. The one sentence that kept the story honest, Galen's own, fell out on the way.

Fields of Egypt

Egypt grows chamomile now. From March to the end of April women and girls do much of the picking, by hand. A photographer who followed them in 2022 called the pay low for such hard work.³¹

Today chamomile is studied as a tea or capsule, as an oil or gel on the skin, as a mouthwash and as a scent. What the trials found is in the Research tab.²⁵

The Greeks smelled apples in it, the Saxons sang to it, and Falstaff trod it down for a laugh. Peter Rabbit got the tea.