Brassica.

BRASSICA OLERACEA, L. Cabbage. Well known vegetable, healthy, antiscorbutic, pectoral when boiled. Raw in coldslaw, or pickled in sourcrout, almost indigestible. Cauliflowers still better than cabbage, the best taste like beef marrow. Cabbage is good food for cattle, but spoils the milk of cows. Eaten by horses, the leaves cure the salivation or slabber. It contains sulphur.

BRASSICA RAPA, L. Turnips. Nutritive, diluent, flatulent, aphrodisiac, diuretic. Spontaneous with us. The Rutabaga is a variety much liked by cattle. Leaves good boiled for greens. The seeds produce much oil; this oil, as well as the decoction and soup of the roots, useful in gravel, cholic, asthma, aphtha, strangury, otalgy, &c. The Br. napus (Kale or Cole) is a native of Arkansas, little known as yet with us: the leaves bleached like Cellery, are sweet and tender; the oil of Coleseed or Br. campestris, almost exclusively used in Holland. Belgic and Flanders, to cook and burn.


Medical Flora, or Manual of the Medical Botany of the United States of North America, Vol. 2, 1830, was written by C. S. Rafinesque.