SaChasi uses all manner of herbs, plants and fruits in its tea blends, which come with lots of health benefits. But using herbs for health is nothing new. One of the most comprehensive books on herbs and healing, The Complete Herbal, was written in 1652 by Nicholas Culpeper.
Nicholas Culpeper was a herbalist, physician, and astrologer in the seventeenth century, which was a time when being all three of those things at once was perfectly normal and not the eclectic selection of interests that they would be considered today.
The Complete Herbal was a groundbreaking collection of information about over 400 medicinal herbs and plants. The most groundbreaking thing about it at the time was that it was written in English. Until then, all medical textbooks were written in Latin because doctors didn't want to share their rarefied knowledge with the common people.
Culpeper openly criticised the established medical authorities, advocated herbal remedies rather than blood-letting and leeches, and frequently gave his services for free, which annoyed his medical contemporaries who liked to charge a big fat fee. He went around saying things like, “No man deserves to starve to pay an insulting, insolent physician.” He was, in short, a very cool guy.
Even though medical knowledge has moved on somewhat since the 1600s, his works remain in print. They’re worth reading for the poetry of the language alone.
So, if you were a seventeenth-century peasant who somehow got hold of a complete set of SaChasi teas (presumably through some kind of comical mix-up with a Royal Mail van and a time machine), what medical benefits would you expect from your brew?
A caveat in case a caveat is needed: Please don’t try any of Nicholas Culpeper’s remedies yourself. If you get rushed to hospital and explain that you started squirting berry tea into your eyes because an article on the internet told you it would balance your humours, well, quite frankly, you're going to look a bit silly.
Beetroot
Found in SaChasi’s “Red Velvet Cupcake” tea
Culpeper spends a lot of time differentiating between the common white beetroot and the fancier red one. They're quite different, he tells us, “The red beet being under Saturn and the white under Jupiter”.
It seems crazy to think of white beetroot as being the norm. I didn’t even know there was such a thing, but I have looked it up, and it is still available from specialist heritage seed sellers. It looks like a turnip. It has definitely fallen out of fashion in the last 400 years. Nowadays, when we think of beetroot, we think "red". Being red is its primary purpose in Red Velvet Cupcake tea.
So, what did Culpeper advise his patients to do with beetroot? Well, he tells us that “the juice of the root put in the nostrils purgeth the head, helpeth the noise in the ears, and the toothache.” Sticking beetroot juice up your nose also "helps a stinking breath". I'm not sure why juice-up-the-nose is the preferred method of beetroot therapy, but there it is. You’d look like you were having an almighty nosebleed.
Do not try pouring Red Velvet Cupcake tea up your nose. There is a much better facial orifice to put tea into.
Blackberry Leaves
Found in SaChasi’s “Dreamy Chocoberry Fondant”, “Upside Down Banana Cake”, & “Chewy Toffee Popcorn” teas
Usually, Culpeper provides a bit of description about the appearance of each herb so that people can recognise it. But for the blackberry entry, he simply states, “It is so well known that it needeth no description.” Basically, if you can’t spot a bramble bush when you see one, then Culpeper hasn’t got time for you.
Lots of the medical treatments make use of the flowers, fruit and roots of the plant, but it's the leaves we're concerned with here because that's what you find in SaChasi tea.
An infusion of blackberry leaves, Culpeper tells us, is “of good use in the ulcers and putrid sores of the mouth, and of the quinsy”.
And if you’re wondering – like I was – what quinsy is, it’s an abscess on your tonsils. The word's still in use, and it has a section on the NHS website, which came as a surprise to me because I don't think I've ever encountered anyone saying they’ve had an attack of the quinsy. ‘Putrid’ is also a word that you don’t hear many people use these days, either. Presumably, because we all tend to have fewer bits of ourselves in a state of decay than they did in the seventeenth century. Maybe the popularity of blackberry leaf tea helped?
Lavender
Found in SaChasi’s “French Kiss Truffles” tea
Lavender is still a popular herb in modern herbalism, and most people, when they think of lavender, think of its soporific qualities. It turns up a lot in sleep-inducing pillows, room sprays and herbal teas.
It is also good, Culpeper informs us, for “pains of the head and brain, falling sickness, and faintings”.
Falling Sickness is the old name for epilepsy, and lavender remains the international flower of epilepsy due to its history of being used to treat the condition. Some people find lavender oil helpful before a fit, but there's little definitive evidence proving its benefit. And while it is tentatively suggested by The Epilepsy Society, it's only aromatherapy oils that are being considered. Do not try administering French Kiss Truffles tea to a loved one with an epileptic seizure. They won't thank you.
Culpeper also recommends that a “decoction made of the flowers of Lavender, Horehound, Fennel and Asparagus-root, and a little Cinnamon is good against the tooth-ache.” It’s interesting that cinnamon is listed as an ingredient here because it doesn’t appear in the four-hundred-strong list of herbs in The Complete Herbal. So they did have cinnamon in Culpeper's time, but it was only used for flavouring other things rather than being a useful medicinal plant.
Marigold petals
Found in SaChasi’s “Rhubarb and Cranberry Cobbler” tea
Marigolds, Culpeper tells us, are good for smallpox and measles. But then, so is having a vaccination and not getting measles or smallpox in the first place. I feel a bit bad now that I created a whimsical hypothetical situation where the seventeenth-century peasant only gets a time-travelling box of tea rather than a life-saving vaccine. Sorry, guys!
Culpeper also advises using marigold petals as a treatment for fevers, jaundice, sore eyes and warts, which is quite a lot of things for something that usually just sits around in window boxes. It doesn’t look like it’s used for any of those things now, mind, but you can get a whole bunch of Calendula-infused face washes and nappy creams at Boots.
Culpeper also tells us that “a good quantity of marigold petal juice is put into treacle water.”
You may ask, 'What is treacle water, and why is it mentioned in a medical book?’ I certainly did.
It turns out that the enticingly named treacle water was quite a thing back in the day. It was a well-regarded medicine using plants distilled in Venice treacle.
I wondered why the treacle had to be from Venice when we have perfectly good treacle of our own right here, but it turns out that Venice Treacle is not actual treacle. The original meaning of ‘treacle’ was a medicinal compound used as a remedy against poison. (Which is why there’s a treacle well in Binsey, Oxfordshire.)
The ingredients of Venice treacle vary depending on where you look, but it usually contained snake venom or flesh, opium, hemp and a whole host of specially blended herbs and spices.
You would then add more things like marigold petals and stuff to your Venice treacle to make the treacle water mentioned by Culpeper.
I found a recipe for treacle water from an 18th-century collection by Margaret Bampfylde. Of course, if I were going to make it, I'd need to get my hands on some snake-infused Venice treacle to make this, which I imagine would be quite problematic.
Meadowsweet
Found in SaChasi’s “Glazed Funfetti Donuts” tea
Meadowsweet flowers, Culpeper tells us, are “alexipharmic and sudorific”.
The first word means it's an antidote to poison, and the second one means sweat-inducing. For a book known for its plain-speaking language, Culpeper's complete herbal does contain a lot of fancy long words.
Meadowsweet is also “a good wound-herb, whether taken inwardly or externally applied.” So, if you've been challenged to a duel by an affronted party, it might be a good idea to take some Glazed Funfetti Donuts tea with you in case you get stabbed or shot. I mean, it probably won't help, but it's worth a shot. And if you win the duel, you can have a celebratory cup of tea afterwards.
Oats
Found in SaChasi’s “Custardy Apple Crumble” tea
A surprise entry, this. You don’t usually think of oats as being a herb. Mostly, Culpeper seems to recommend making some kind of bizarre porridge and applying it to your external bits.
“Oats fried with bay salt, and applied to the sides, take away the pains of stitches and wind in the sides of the belly.” Culpeper doesn’t mention if it’s OK to eat the herby porridge afterwards.
A “poultice made of the meal of oats, and some oil of bays added” was used to treat leprosy. I don’t imagine Culpeper saw a lot of leprosy cases. Although leprosy was rife in England between the 11th and 14th centuries, by Culpeper's time, it was very much on the decline. The last indigenous case of leprosy was in 1798. (It does still exist in other countries even today, and you can check out lepra.org.uk to find out more.)
You can also use your porridgey poultice to treat “fistulas of the fundament” and “imposthumes", which both sound like things you'd want to be rid of. Apparently, oats boiled with vinegar also take away freckles and spots. Although, you should check that no one in the house needs to use your oats for fistulas, imposthumes or leprosy first. Those things would take priority over freckle removal, I reckon.
Raspberry
Found in SaChasi’s “Raspberry Ripple Cheesecake”, “Wild Berry Tart” and “Raspberry Rose Friands” teas
Culpeper describes raspberries several times as 'grateful', which seems like a strange word to use to describe a fruit. However, the dictionary informs me that the archaic meaning of the word is "pleasing by reason of comfort supplied or discomfort alleviated," so that makes sense. All the plants on the list are grateful, by that reckoning.
The fruit can be used to strengthen the stomach and prevent vomiting. It’s also handy if you want something that “dissolves the tartarous concretions on the teeth”. (Although apparently, it's not as good as strawberries.) It's kind of cool that Culpeper includes advice on tooth care here. I always assumed that people back in the day completely neglected their teeth.
Rose petals, Rosebuds & Rosehips
Found in SaChasi’s “Watermelon Kiwi Popsicle”, “Raspberry Rose Friands”, “Super Berry Brownies”, “Dreamy Chocoberry Fondant”, “Salted Caramel Stroopwafels”, “Classic Apricot Sachertorte”, “Red Velvet Cupcake”, and “Custardy Apple Crumble” teas
Roses are a firm favourite in the SaChasi Blending House, with both the delicate floral flavour of the petals and the fruity tang of the hips putting in appearances in multiple SaChasi blends.
Culpeper has a lot to say about roses. In fact, the Complete Herbal lists Damask, red and white roses as separate entities (with different astrological virtues), as well as including a separate entry for rosehips.
So, what could roses cure you of in the seventeenth century? In all honesty, it’d be easier to list what they couldn’t cure you of. (Not literally, obviously; I'm employing some hyperbole here, but they can help you with all the following (deep breath):
Aching joints, colds, consumption, constipation, coughs, defluxions of rheum, diseases of the stomach, distempers of the breast, excess of the catamenia, fainting, fevers, fluxes of the belly, gonorrhoea, headaches, haemorrhages, infections, inflammation of the heart, irregular bowels, jaundice, loose teeth, looseness of humours, mouth sores, overflowing of the menses, overheated livers, overheated spirits, pains in the eyes, ears, throat and gums, pimples, putrefication, redness of the eyes, sleeplessness, slippery bowels, sore throat, spitting of blood, St Anthony's fire, swooning, tickling rheums, trembling of the heart, vomiting and a weak constitution.
And if you did read through all of that and are wondering what St Anthony's Fire is, well, it's the effect of long-term ergot poisoning. However, Culpeper wouldn't have known what caused its gangrenous symptoms because the link between St Anthony's Fire wasn't discovered until 1676, and Culpeper died in 1654.
The use of roses in modern-day medicine seems to be confined to complementary and alternative treatments like aromatherapy and homoeopathy. There don’t seem to be any Rosa-derived pharmaceutical concoctions which surprised me as Culpeper clearly thought it was the bee’s knees.
(As a side note, if you search for ‘rose’ on the Boots pharmacy website, you get an awful lot of vibrators in the results...)
Strawberry
Found in SaChasi’s “Dreamy Chocoberry Fondant” and “Super Berry Brownies” teas
Strawberries, Culpeper informs us, "cool the blood, the liver and the spleen, or a hot choleric stomach.”
Now, the thing about having a choleric stomach is that it means your humours are out of whack. Seventeenth-century medical diagnoses were very much humour-based. In fact, this was the last point of history where humours were still in favour. The system had been in use since ancient times, but by the eighteenth century, it had been discredited as a system due to the discovery of germs.
There are four humours: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. Ideally, you should be a nice healthy mix of all four. Mental and physical health problems would often be diagnosed as you having way too much of one and not enough of another. Each humour is hot or cold and wet or dry. The choleric humour is the hot, dry humour, which is possibly why some nice, cold, wet strawberries did the trick.
The juice of strawberries “is singularly good for hot or inflamed eyes, if dropped into them, or they bathed therewith.” However, I don't recommend that you try tipping Dreamy Chocoberry Fondant tea into your eyes in order to sort out eye inflammations. I don't recommend dropping strawberry juice into them either, for that matter. Consult your pharmacist.
Conclusion
Many of the ingredients used in SaChasi tea weren't available to seventeenth-century English physicians. What would a time-travelling Culpeper make of ashwagandha, mesquite and lucuma powder in SaChasi teas? Or at least what would he make of them once he'd settled down and processed the existence of time travel, the internet, female suffrage and the eradication of smallpox?
Actually, he'd probably be cool with it. He was a practical-minded and forward-thinking kind of guy. Once he'd come to terms with the whole suddenly-being-in-the-21st-century thing – probably over a nice cup of Salted Caramel Stroopwafels tea – he might suggest introducing a few other herbs from his collection into Sa Chasi tea blends. Tea with adder’s tongue, spleenwort, tobacco, onion or spunk* anyone?
* a type of bracket mushroom, not whatever you were thinking of.