What a relief

Generations have sworn by dock leaves to take the sting out of a brush with nettles, even if modern medicine disagrees

- Ian Morton

STUNG by nettles? Rub the rash with a dock leaf. Who doesn’t know that? And it appears it was always so. The Anglo-Saxon chronicles of the late 9th century recorded it. In 1386, in Troilus and Creseyde, Chaucer quoted an ancient charm to be recited as the leaf was applied: ‘Netle in, dokke out.’ Folk practice and herbal advice down the centuries confirmed the idea and it was surely no coincidence that nettle and dock so often grew in close proximity. The efficacy of the dock leaf in countering the chemicals released by Urtica dioica may be dismissed by modern pharmacology (the rubbing action may be what matters most), but generations have sworn by it.

Relief from nettle stings was only part of a wider medicinal bounty apparently offered by dock leaves. Their virtue was declared in Bald’s Leechbook, a 9th-century collection of ancient medical lore (a manuscript of it is held by the British Library), as a remedy for ‘water-elf sickness’, an ancient expression that covered skin eruptions including chicken pox, measles and ergot poisoning (‘leech’, a dismissive word supposedly based on the use of the slimy annelid for bloodletting, derives from laece, Anglo-Saxon for doctor).

Bald’s text declares: ‘I have wreathed round the wounds the best of healing wreaths, so the baneful sores may neither burn or burst, nor find their way further, nor turn foul and fallow, nor thump and throb, nor be wicked wounds, nor dig deeply down: but he himself may hold in a way to health.’