Fox-glove.
Digitalis.
A very beautiful wild plant in our pasture?, and about wood-sides. The leaves are whitish, and the flowers large and red. It is three feel high. The leaves are large, long, rough on the surface, pointed at the ends, and serrated round the edges. The stalks are round, thick, firm, and upright, and of a white colour. The flower, hang down from the stalk in a kind of spike: they are hollow, red, large, and a little spotted with white; they are shaped like the end of the finger of a glove.
The plant boiled in ale, is taken by people of robust constitutions, for the rheumatism and other stubborn complaints; it works violently upwards and downwards; and cures also quartan agues, and, as is said, the falling-sickness. An ointment made of the flowers of fox-glove boiled in May butter, has been long famous in scrophulous sores.
