The Fever-Scattering Daisy

Feverfew, Tanacetum parthenium, is a bushy aromatic perennial of the daisy family with small white-rayed flowers and a pungent scent, long grown in cottage gardens. Its English name is a worn-down form of the Latin febrifuga, fever-driver, recording the use for which it was chiefly valued; its old domestic reputation as a remedy for headache and fever is noted here as folk history and not as medical advice. The species name parthenium, from the Greek for maiden, is tied by legend to the Parthenon: the herb was said to have saved the life of a workman who fell during the building of the temple.

Feverfew is one of the few traditional herbs to have been seriously tested by modern medicine for a specific complaint, migraine: clinical trials since the 1980s have examined feverfew leaf as a preventive treatment, and a 2015 Cochrane systematic review found a modest reduction in migraine frequency compared with placebo, though it rated the evidence as low quality and called for larger, better-standardised trials before firm conclusions could be drawn. It is a rare instance in this atlas of a plant's old reputation as a remedy for headache converging, however inconclusively, on the very complaint modern researchers chose to investigate.