Onions in the Garden of Health (1578)

Looking today through Langham’s Garden of Health (1578) for delightful remedies for the forthcoming book, I am taken by the straightforward and easy arrangement of the material. The format is an alphabetical list of several hundred ‘simples’, plants mostly, each of which has a compilation of numbered uses, followed by an index of conditions to which the simple is to be applied. At the end of the book there is a page index by condition, each one listing alphabetically the simples to be tried.

Thus mugwort has dozens of applications, the 133^rd of which is ‘Joyntes out, stampe Mugwort with Vineger and swines grease, and apply it.’  The ‘easy solution’ manner of the writing – ‘Nostrels stinke, boyle Roses with hony in wine, and put them in’ – is reminiscent of the ‘Frisky, fly-away hair? Try Xbrand hair-spray’ style of disingenuous advertising of the 1970s.  Got a problem? Deal with it this way. What could be simpler? A problem is not a problem. Got the plague? Drinke as much powder of the roote of dog-fennel as will lye on a crowne with vineger – problem solved. I smile while I am reading. I'll buy it.

I smile until I am pulled up short by wince-inducing entries (maybe not the best word) like ‘An onion put in as a suppositorie, purgeth the emerods, …’  I don’t really want to know any more, but am drawn to read on; in the section on onions, it seems that the insertion of an onion is a practice applicable to more or less any disease involving one of the body’s openings:

‘Nose bleeding, put in an Onion.’ 

‘Lethargie, put the juice of an Onion into the nostrells.’

‘Urine stopt in Agues, roste an Onion, and apply it to the bladder.’ 

Now, a few questions arise. For the nose-bleed, is the onion being used primarily as a stopper? For ‘lethargie’, is the onion juice a sign of desperation, something you might use on a teenager still in bed at lunchtime? Is the ‘roste Onion’ still piping hot when it is to be applied to the bladder? How is it to be applied, or am I better off not knowing? I want to know, and I want there to be a simple and pleasant answer. But I suspect that there’s more than one way of interpreting that well-known statement, ‘onions make you cry’.