Lemon balm

The hen that grew new feathers

Paris, 1660. The king's chemist has a story to tell about a hen.¹

Nicaise Le Febvre had taught chemistry at the royal garden since 1652, and that year he published his course.^{1, 2} In a passage on remedies that renew the body, he paused for "a true history" of one of his best friends. The friend had made the "first being" of balm, an essence of the herb rotted down in horse dung, by the method of Paracelsus. Now he wanted proof.¹

He tried it on himself, on an old servant woman of about seventy and on an old hen.¹ Every morning for about fifteen days he drank a glass of white wine tinted with the essence, on an empty stomach. From the first days his fingernails and toenails began to lift away from the skin, painlessly, until they fell off. He had seen enough.¹

He gave the same wine to the servant every morning without telling her what it could do. Before ten or twelve days were out, her monthly bleeding came back. She was terrified, sure it meant she was dying, because she had no idea she had taken anything that could make her young. Between her fright and his nails, he dared not go on.¹

That left the hen. For about eight days she was fed grain soaked in the wine. On the sixth her feathers began to drop, a few at a time, until she stood there bare. Before the fortnight was out they grew back, finer and better coloured than before, her comb stood up again, and she laid more eggs than usual.¹

Le Febvre expected the learned to call it ridiculous, and printed it anyway.¹ His friend's elixir was the strangest moment in two thousand years of people turning to one lemon-scented herb for their bees, their hearts and their minds.

The bee leaf

Its first job was with bees, and its name says so. Botanists call it Melissa, Greek for a bee.³

In the Georgics, his poem on farming of around 29 BC, Virgil told beekeepers what to do when a swarm rose and drifted across the summer sky. Sprinkle "bruised balm and the humble honeywort," he wrote, and clash the cymbals of the Great Mother. The bees will settle on the scented hive of their own accord.⁴

A century later Pliny the Elder was blunter. Rub the hives all over with it and the bees will never desert them, "for there is no flower in which they take greater delight."⁵

Fifteen centuries on, the London barber-surgeon John Gerard gave the same advice in his Herball of 1597. Plant balm by the hives, because strayed bees "do finde their way home againe by it," and rub the hives with its leaves to keep the swarm together.⁶

Nails, hair and teeth

Le Febvre's friend had not invented his elixir. He was following a recipe printed among the works of Paracelsus, the Swiss physician and alchemist who died in 1541.⁷

"Take celandine or balm," it begins. Beat it to a pulp, seal it in a glass and bury it in horse dung for a month, then give it a month in the sun. Tint good wine with it and drink some every day about dawn, "until first of all the nails fall off from the fingers, afterwards from the feet, then the hair and teeth." Last of all the old skin dries up and a new one grows. Then come new nails, new hair and fresh teeth.⁸ Another book in the same works calls the quintessence of melissa simply "the Elixir of Life."⁹

To Le Febvre none of this was absurd. Every spring, he pointed out, snakes slough their skins and stags cast their antlers.¹ His friend's nails had come off just as the recipe promised. The friend did not stay to find out about the teeth.^{1, 8}

Balm in the salad bowl

Gentler uses were centuries older. "Bawme drunke in wine," Gerard wrote, "comforteth the hart, and driveth away all melancholie and sadnesse." He credited the great Persian physician Avicenna, who taught that balm "maketh the hart merrie & ioiful."⁶

A student of Le Febvre's carried the merry heart into the English kitchen. In February 1647 a young Englishman in Paris, John Evelyn, began attending the private chemistry course of "the famous Monsieur Le Febure."^{2, 10} In 1699, in his late seventies, Evelyn published Acetaria, a whole book about salads. Balm went into the bowl as "Cordial and exhilarating, sovereign for the Brain, strengthning the Memory, and powerfully chasing away Melancholy." Fresh sprigs in summer wine gave it "a marvellous quickness."¹¹

The water at the prison door

The barefoot Carmelite friars reached Paris in 1610, just after the death of King Henri IV, and at Pentecost 1611 they moved into a house on the rue de Vaugirard.¹²

Balm water was invented in their apothecary's shop, a Paris guidebook said in 1765, which is why the city called it Eau des Carmes. The friars sold vast quantities and claimed it held many herbs from their gardens. Paris knew better. It was "nothing but balm water, the kind made everywhere else."¹² Sales topped 3,000 livres a month. When the Revolution came for the monasteries, the friars asked to keep their balm-water equipment, so as "to continue making this water and be useful to the public." The authorities refused, then three days later sold it back to them for 60,000 livres.¹²

By August 1792 their church was a prison. After the monarchy fell, priests who had refused the revolutionary oath were rounded up across Paris and locked inside, the archbishop of Arles among them.¹² The water was still on sale. On Thursday 23 August a volunteer grenadier, Jean-Hypolite Dudouit La Vilette, went to the Carmelites "to buy balm water." A guard handed him a sealed letter, caught on its way to a prisoner, and some of its phrases sent the grenadier to the local committee.¹²

At about four on the afternoon of 2 September, the prisoners were sent down into the garden, a great square of sanded walks around a round pond. One, the abbé Girault, stayed by the pond reading his prayers. In the church of Saint-Sulpice nearby, the district assembly had just voted to "purge the prisons by spilling blood" before marching to the front. Men from the meeting ran for the Carmelites, the Marseille volunteers foremost among them. They burst through the garden door. Girault, still reading, was the first they reached.¹²

By the historian Alexandre Sorel's count from the archives, 117 people died there that day.¹²

A secret under three locks

The recipe survived the Terror. In 1842 a Paris commercial court heard its story from the man who claimed to own it, Amédée Boyer. In his telling, the friars' 60,000 livres had bought back the secret itself. The recipe was trusted to the three oldest friars and kept in a chest with three locks until 1824, when the last six friars sold it. Boyer had paid 80,000 francs for it.¹³

His rival, the pharmacist Richard Desruez, had opened right next door. His shop was painted the same colour, his boxes stood the same way in the window, and he called his balm water Carmelite water too. The paralysed and the apoplectic who went through the wrong door, the plaintiffs warned, risked going home uncured, or not going home at all.¹³

The court threw the claim out. France's official pharmacopoeia already listed compound spirit of balm, "commonly called Carmelite water," so the name belonged to every pharmacist.¹³

The Newcastle hunch

In 1998 Elaine Perry and colleagues at the Medical Research Council in Newcastle went back to the old herbals. They noted that "Old European reference books" credited balm with "memory improving properties," and suggested it might be time "to re-explore historical archives."¹⁴

Newcastle did. In 2002 Perry, Clive Ballard and colleagues reported a trial in NHS care homes with 72 people who had severe dementia and serious agitation. Twice a day for four weeks, care staff smoothed a lotion onto their faces and arms, with balm oil in it for half of them and sunflower oil for the rest.¹⁵ Across the city at Northumbria University, David Kennedy's group tested the memory and attention of twenty healthy young volunteers on balm extract and a dummy pill.¹⁶

Balm oil smells of lemon, though, so anyone scoring the patients might guess who had the real thing.^{3, 17} In a larger trial published in 2011, with 114 care-home residents, the people doing the scoring had to wear nose clips.¹⁷ What these trials found is in the Research tab.

A prince from a village choir

Herb books still repeat three balm stories from one paragraph of Maud Grieve's A Modern Herbal of 1931. John Hussey of Sydenham, who lived to 116, breakfasted for fifty years on balm tea and honey. "Llewelyn, Prince of Glamorgan," breakfasted on herb teas and died in his 108th year. And the Emperor Charles V drank Carmelite water every day.³

Hussey was real, at least on paper. In April 1748 the Gentleman's Magazine recorded the death of "John Hussey at Sydenham, formerly a farmer at Crawfurd, Kent, aged 116." It added that for more than fifty years he had breakfasted on "balm tea, sweeten'd with honey" and dined on pudding.¹⁸ In the 1790s the clergyman Daniel Lysons copied the long lives out of the parish register of Lewisham, which took in Sydenham. He found a woman of 109 from Sydenham and one buried at 110, "as on the coffin," but no Hussey.¹⁸ Only one man has ever been proven to reach 116, Jiroemon Kimura of Japan, who died in 2013.¹⁹

The prince began as a Welshman who could still lead a village choir at close to a hundred. In 1799 James Easton's Human Longevity listed Fluellyn Pryce of Glamorgan, who died in 1779 at 101. Within three years of his death he directed a village choir in some variations for a Sunday. He took herb teas for breakfast and, instead of supper, a pipe of tobacco.²⁰ In 1807 Sir John Sinclair copied him as "Fluellyn Price," now dead in his 108th year. By 1816 Sinclair's book called him "Fluellyn Prince of Glamorgan."²¹ One changed letter, one added, and a Welsh villager was royalty. In 1869 the essayist Lionel Tollemache suspected the prince and Pryce "may have been one and the same person."²² The prince lived on anyway, and by 1988 a herb book had him drinking his tea in the thirteenth century.²³

Charles V never had a chance at the water. The emperor died in 1558 at the monastery of Yuste in Spain, half a century before the friars reached Paris.^{12, 24} Later books moved the story back to 1379, to the nuns of "the Carmelite abbey of St. Just," who cared for another Charles V, King of France, in his "advanced senility." He was 41.²⁵ The Carmelites had no nuns until 1452. And in older books the emperor's Yuste goes by San Just.^{24, 26}

The best line is real, or nearly. Herb books love a line from "The London Dispensary (1696)." An essence of balm in Canary wine every morning, it says, "will renew youth, strengthen the brain, relieve languishing nature and prevent baldness."³ It comes from William Salmon's New London Dispensatory of 1678, reprinted in 1696.²⁷ But his essence was not plain balm. It was balm and greater celandine, with rosemary and poppy flowers, and the Paracelsus recipe that made the nails fall off called for celandine or balm.^{8, 27} By 1895, when an English herbal quoted the line, the celandine and the poppies had gone.²⁸

Still the bee leaf

Every age has found its own use for balm, as a lure for swarms, a comfort for the heart, an elixir, a friary's fortune and a lotion in a care home. Today it is a garden herb and a cup of tea.

Le Febvre's friend wanted it to make him young. The bees just wanted the flowers. There is no flower, Pliny wrote, in which they take greater delight.⁵