Valerian

The powder in the milk

Naples, 1592. A young lawyer pays to print a book that no publisher would take.¹

His name is Fabio Colonna. He comes from a Naples branch of the great Roman family of that name, and he holds a degree in both kinds of law. Since his youth he has suffered from epilepsy, the illness the ancients called Herculean because it seizes its victims with such force.^{1, 4} What use is a life that illness harries every day? It would be, in the Greek phrase he slips into his preface, a life that is no life. His own fits came so often that he had to give up his other studies. Now he has escaped them.²

Scholars of the day could not agree which plants the old Greek writers had meant. Colonna set out, in his biographer's words, to cure that ill and his own.⁴ He read Hippocrates and Galen to test his physicians' advice, and wondered whether the apothecaries even knew their plants.² Then he took to the mountains and woods, comparing the plants he found with the descriptions of the Greek physician Dioscorides. He wrote that nobody showed him and nobody taught him, as his friends well knew.^{1, 2}

Dioscorides had described a root called phu whose tangled yellowish fibres smelled sweet, like nard, but with a certain heaviness.³ It was no obscure herb, because its root went into theriac, the great antidote, and in no small amount. Yet all the learned men of his day, Colonna complained, pinned the name with one voice on the wrong plant, the so-called great valerian. He put forward instead a wild valerian, common in the shady hills and wet meadows near his home, and declared it the true phu "against the opinion of everyone".³

In the last lines of his chapter on phu he added a power of his own, "long since tested in many people, and in myself". He wrote that a powder of the wild root, dug before it sends up its stem and taken in wine, water or milk, sets free those seized by epilepsy.³

He gave it to friends to give to children, and above all to babies, with orders that it be taken in milk. Afterwards, having first given glory to God, the friends told him the plant had brought the children's health back. Some grown-ups too.³

His preface tells it differently. There he owes his escape from epilepsy to the mercy of God and the intercession of the Virgin Mary, and the root is not mentioned.² Years later a friar and herbalist from Ferrara, Evangelista Quattrami, attacked him in print over this very plant. Colonna answered in a long letter, and still said not a word about its famous power.⁴

His biographer, writing in 1744, could not settle it either. In his life of Colonna the herb did the curing, and Colonna was too sharp and pious to give it much of the credit. In the notes the biographer added, it was not the herb alone, but growing older, a change of air and, above all, God.⁴

The book wrecked his finances. Instead of woodcuts, he insisted on making its thirty-five copper engravings himself, the first time copper had been used for such a work.¹

His root travelled further than he did. In 1706 a Monsieur Marchant, who had learned of the plant from Colonna's book, reported to the Paris Academy of Sciences that it had entirely cured three young people of epilepsy.⁴ By the late 1700s it was often counted the best treatment for epilepsy there was.⁵

Colonna went on to show that the fossils called "tongue stones" were not snakes' tongues but sharks' teeth.¹ He died in Naples in 1640.¹ A century later his biographer went looking for how he ended. After a long search he was told that in his last years, as if broken by long study and labour, the man who had read the Greek doctors in Greek forgot his letters entirely, until nobody knew he was still alive. The fits, the biographer believed, had come back.⁴

Setwall in the broth

In London in 1597, the surgeon John Gerard brought out his Herball. In English, he wrote, the valerians went by Valerian, Capon's tail and Setwall, though Setwall properly belonged to zedoary, "which is not Valerian".⁶

The dried root went into the counterpoisons and plague medicines of the day, while the wild kind was thought good for cramp and convulsions and for anyone bruised by a fall.⁶

In the north it was revered. Gerard wrote that among the poor people of the northern parts, no broth, stew or sickroom dish was worth anything unless setwall was in it, "whereupon some woman poet or other hath made these verses". "They that will have their heale, must put Setwall in their keale."⁶

The viper-catchers' root

By the 1750s, London's druggists got their valerian from viper-catchers, wandering medicine-sellers who tramped the kingdom hunting vipers and brought in roots on the side.⁷ Water valerian outnumbered the good heath kind a hundred to one, so water valerian is what they dug. They threw in worse. "I have raised a plant of the smooth water crowfoot, which is poisonous," wrote John Hill, "from a root sold among Wild Valerian."⁷

Hill was a doctor of many talents who wrote more than a hundred books and pamphlets, picked fights with scientists and writers alike, and was despised by most of his contemporaries for it. Turned down by the Royal Society, he mocked it in satires under a false name.^{7, 8}

His pamphlet on valerian cost a shilling and reached a third edition in 1758. The true root grew on dry, barren ground, he insisted, the false in wet mud, and the shops were full of the false. A Dr Conyers, lately a censor of the College of Physicians, told him that a search of London had found the true root in one shop. Only one.⁷

On the great heath at Hind Head, on the road to Portsmouth, Hill had seen a vast quantity. Like Colonna, he wanted it dug just as it was getting ready to send up its stem.⁷

The cats could tell the two roots apart, he noticed, and preferred the wrong one. They would "busy themselves extremely" about the stinking water root and show little regard to the good one.⁷

Properly gathered, the heath root was in his view "a sovereign medicine in nervous disorders", the best thing against "that worst of head-achs, which arises from attention", and twice it had cured the nightmare.⁷ He made a tincture for his friends. The rest of his roots went to a Mr Tomson, "a very worthy young man, who proposes to make it for the publick".⁷

Dolphin oil and socks

Hill thought the foetid note in good valerian "scarce deserves so coarse a name".⁷ Colonna had been blunter. To him the root smelled of nard with a goatish heaviness mixed in, and that was how it got its name, because anyone who recoils from the stink says "phu!" without thinking.³

In 1817 the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul was taking apart the oils of dolphins and porpoises when he found a new acid.⁹ Its smell was very strong, something like vinegar and strong butter at once, and impossible to mistake once smelled. It left glass, paper and cloth reeking of slightly old dolphin oil. He tasted it too. It was sharp at first, then oddly like a reinette apple, and it left a white spot on the tongue. He named it delphinic acid, after the dolphin, then phocenic acid, after the porpoise.⁹

Later chemists found the same acid in valerian root, and it was renamed after the plant.¹⁰ It builds up as the root dries and gives valerian its smell. Chemists now call it isovaleric acid.^{11, 12}

In 1990 a team at Shiseido's research centre in Yokohama went looking for the cause of smelly feet. They drew the acids out of their volunteers' socks and feet. Isovaleric acid turned up in every one with foot odour, and in none of those without.¹²

Cats are another matter. As it dries the root develops "a foetid odour, which acts as a charm upon cats," wrote Edward Step in his pocket guide for country ramblers of 1895. "If the reader would have cheerful nights let him plant Valerian in his garden, and every cat in the neighbourhood will call to enjoy it."¹³ Bruise a leaf or a root, Maud Grieve warned later, and you can scarcely keep the plant in your garden, because the cats arrive at once and "roll on the unfortunate plant".¹¹

Nerves in the air raids

When the First World War cut Britain off from the continental herbs it relied on, Maud Grieve turned her nursery at Chalfont St Peter, in Buckinghamshire, into a herb farm and started a herb school. After the war her pamphlets on single plants, more than three hundred of them, became A Modern Herbal.¹⁴

Grieve had a wartime story for valerian. "During the recent War, when air-raids were a serious strain on the overwrought nerves of civilian men and women," she wrote, valerian mixed with other simple ingredients "proved wonderfully efficacious".¹¹

Her "recent War" could only be the war of 1914 to 1918, because the book came out in 1931.¹¹

In the next war valerian was wanted again. In 1941 the government's Vegetable Drugs Committee named it among the six medicinal plants Britain needed most, all of which had come from Hungary, Italy, Germany and Yugoslavia. Kew's director, Sir Arthur Hill, enlisted Women's Institutes, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and the elderly as herb collectors.¹⁶

One museum website has valerian calming the Second World War air raids as well, and herbal and gardening sites give it to shell-shocked soldiers in both wars. None of them names a record.¹⁵

The piper's pockets

The Pied Piper of Hamelin filled his pockets with valerian root to draw the rats out of the town. That is one gardening site's version of the old folktale.¹⁷

Follow it back and the trail is short. In 1931 Grieve gave it as something that "has been suggested".¹¹ In 1895 Edward Step, a few lines after his cats, put it as a question. Rats were "equally delighted" with valerian, he wrote, and rat-catchers were said to use it to draw them. Then he asked, "Had the Pied-piper a root of Valerian in his poke?"¹³ Nothing older has turned up.

The bigger surprise is the rats. A manuscript of about 1450 tells how a young man with a silver pipe came to Hamelin in 1284, and how 130 children followed him out of the town and vanished. Their mothers ran from town to town and found nothing. This early account has no rats at all.^{18, 20} The rats first appear about 1560, in a German count's family chronicle, where the piper offers to end a plague of rats and is cheated of his reward.^{19, 20}

So the rats joined the story nearly three centuries after the children, and the valerian more than three centuries after the rats.

A second story sounds more official. A US government health fact sheet says that in the second century Galen prescribed valerian for insomnia, and the line has spread from site to site.²¹ Galen's own entry on phu survives. There the root is somewhat aromatic, close to nard in its powers but weaker for most purposes, and it moves urine more than Indian or Syrian nard does.²² Not a word about sleep. And as Colonna found, nobody could even agree which plant phu was.³

Every cat in the neighbourhood

Every age has found its own use for valerian, from broth to socks. What the modern trials found is in the Research tab.

In 2017 a team in Riverside, California, knotted dried valerian root inside socks and offered them to a hundred cats. Just under half of them responded.²³

It still grows wild by rivers, ditches and damp meadows, its tall stems standing above the grass in summer.^{6, 11, 24} Dig up a root, as Colonna did, let it dry, and Edward Step's promise nearly holds. Almost every second cat in the neighbourhood will call.^{3, 13, 23}