Culpeper: ‘Cerefolium vulgare & Myrrhis. Common and Great Chervil: take them both together and they ... provoke urine, stir up lust and the desire for copulation, comfort the heart and are good for old people, help pleurises and pricking in the sides.’ He adds (in his Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1826) with respect to Sweet Cicely ‘... leaves cut into divers parts, but of a fresher green colour than the hemlock, tasting as sweet as aniseed.’

OTHER COMMON NAMES:ANISE;BRITISH MYRRH;GARDEN MYRRH;GREAT CHERVIL;MYRRH;SWEET BRACKEN;SWEET CHERVIL;SWEET FERN;SWEET MARY; GARDEN Myrrh

Notes: This is in the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis as Myrrhis, but it is not clear if this is now known as Anthriscus sylvestris (Cow Parsley or Wild Chervil), or Myrrhis odorata (Sweet Cicely). This was the problem with names before Linnaeus, and the botanists that came after him, gave plants individual Latin names, the binomial (two name) system, starting in 1753. Both plants can be confused with hemlock, Conium maculatum, the source of the poison that killed Socrates (for a masterly account of the detective work that settled two millennia of debate on the subject see http://www.nd.edu/~plato/bloch.htm).

Trans-anethole, an alkenylbenzene, is carcinogenic, not genotoxic. Increased hepatocellular carcinoma secondary to hepatotoxicity in female rats over two year period.