240 
YEW POISONING. 
England it is recommended in epilepsy, but with about as 
much efficacy as most such prescriptions. Its use as a remedy 
in epilepsy was recently revived in legitimate medicine, but 
it has obtained no permanent reputation as a remedy.” 
The truth is, the plant is perfectly innocuous, and, as a 
rule, so is the whole order, and so they may be innocently 
enough employed as dressings to cut-wounds, a very common 
use for the larger leaved species, which are, indeed, grown on 
cottage roofs and walls for the purpose. Taken as herb tea 
for stone or external weakness they will, perhaps, not do harm, 
but it must sometimes be pitiable to find persons’ time wasted 
in the employment of simples upon a principle, or rather want 
of principle, as simple as the simpletons who place such 
implicit confidence in them. 
YEW POISONING. 
By the same. 
I have again to thank Mr. Gerrard for some additional 
remarks upon my notes concerning “ yew poisoning.” 
Of course I shall not enter the list with him as a contro¬ 
versialist in his own but not my profession, but when he says 
I am “ the first to doubt or disbelieve” in the nature of yew 
poisoning as commonly understood, he will I am sure excuse 
me if I put him right upon this part of the subject. 
Pereira says, “ The poisonous properties of yew were 
known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and have been 
fully established by modern experience, although some few 
writers have expressed doubts concerning them.”* 
Old Gerarde in adverting to the fact that the ancients 
believed it to be fatal to sleep under the yew and that its 
berries were poisonous, says, “ All which, I dare boldly 
affirm, is untrue ; for when I was young and went to school, 
divers young schoolfellows, and likewise myself, did eat our 
fils of the berries of this tree, and have not only slept under 
the shadow thereof, but among the branches also, without any 
hurt at all, and all that not one time, but many times.” 
At one time it was even asserted that vessels made of the 
wood of yew imparted an evil effect to the contained fluid, 
but Evelyn quaintly remarks that “ the toxic quality was 
* * Materia Medica,’ 4th edition, vol. ii, part I, p. 334. 
