Sell Your Coat and Buy Betony

Wood betony, Betonica officinalis (also given as Stachys officinalis), is a low perennial of the mint family with a spike of reddish-purple flowers, once among the most highly esteemed of all healing and protective herbs. An old Italian proverb praised anyone of many virtues as having as many as betony, and a saying urged, sell your coat and buy betony. The physician Antonius Musa, said to have attended the emperor Augustus, was credited with a whole treatise on its virtues, listing it against a great catalogue of ills, a domestic reputation recorded here strictly as history.

Modern pharmacological investigation of wood betony has found comparatively little to justify the vast catalogue of cures once claimed for it: the plant contains mild tannins and alkaloids with some modest astringent and sedative action, but nothing that accounts for the sweeping medieval reputation recorded above, and its use today is largely confined to gentle herbal teas rather than any serious treatment, a case where an old plant's fame appears to have considerably outrun its actual chemistry. Botanists have also long argued over its correct genus, the plant classified at different times as Betonica officinalis and as Stachys officinalis, a small taxonomic dispute unresolved by any change in the plant's use.