Rude Health

Monty Don has started to grow a medicinal herb that’s well known in Ireland, writes Maurice Gueret, as he looks into the fever that levelled Molly Malone

“She died of a fever and no one could save her...” Maurice Gueret on Molly Malone

Sweet medicine

2020 is proving an eventful year for Montagu Don on the BBC. His plot at Longmeadow suffered dreadful flooding over the winter. Then, just as a new series of Gardeners’ World was underway, the Covid-19 lockdown meant he had to do all his own sound and vision, as well as the spadework. A few programmes in, Monty announced the death of Nigel, his faithful canine companion and lover of thrown tennis balls. Mr Don has found refuge in the shady part of his herb garden and I was delighted to see him recently plant an old medicinal favourite called meadowsweet (filipendula ulmaria) among the sorrel and parsley. Nothing at all to do with meadows, its common name should be ‘mead sweet’, as its clusters of creamy-white scented flowers were used to flavour a variety of beverages such as honey mead, beer or cordial. In his wonderful opus, Ireland’s Wild Plants, Niall Mac Coitir tells us that meadowsweet, known locally as the belt of Cuchulainn, was one of the three most sacred herbs of the druids. It was used as a tonic for the nerves in the county of Westmeath, and for kidney trouble and dropsy in the counties of Cavan and Sligo.

Popular drug

Across Europe for centuries, a tea with an almond-like aroma has been made by infusing meadowsweet flowers. It was a common remedy for fever, rheumatic pains of arthritis or gout and inflammation of any sort. Modern medicine learned much from this plant. 19th-Century pharmacists learned how to extract salicylic acid from meadowsweet — a good medicine, but a strong irritant to the stomach. In

1897, German chemist Felix Hoffmann created a new drug (acetylsalicylic acid) from meadowsweet. This caused less tummy upset and was launched by his company in 1899 as a drug you’ve all heard of, aspirin. It soon displaced quinine in the market as the most popular remedy for minor ailments and 121 years on, it’s safe to say that it is the most popular drug of all time.

Cousin Paul

Those nice people at Poetry Ireland have been helping isolated cocooners by inviting them to recitations by phone of verses from much-loved poets. One poem mentioned is that modern classic, Making Love Outside Aras an Uachtarain by Paul Durcan. Now I declare an interest. Durcan is a third cousin twice removed of mine, which may be why we have never met. His poem from 1978, a year before the first papal visit, concerns the son of a poet and the daughter of a judge, who bicycle up to the Phoenix Park and have it off on the lawn outside the President’s gates. It’s a dignified act of public love with the young couple on the green, green grass, dreaming of little more than green, green flags. But later, our modernday Diarmaid and Grainne worry that old de Valera might blindly stalk them down with an ancient rifle and cancel their act of municipal affection with a stiff warning to stop. I like to think that a liberal Michael D, himself a poet, would harbour no such objections to young lovers frolicking outside his lodge. As long as paramours are already cohabiting, hygiene protocols are followed, and participants adhere religiously to the current travelrestriction phase for bicycles of the Taoiseach’s roadmap.

Molly’s end

Speaking of verse, I was wondering how Molly

Malone, pictured above, was faring without the groping of tourists, when word came that her sculptor, Jeanne Rynhart, had sadly passed away. Jury’s Hotels commissioned Molly for Dublin’s millennium of 1988. She later wheeled her barrow up narrow Suffolk Street to allow Luas tracks to be built. The plan was to rehouse her on Grafton Street once trams were moving, but this hasn’t happened. Molly died of a fever, nobody could save her, and that was her sweet end, if, indeed, she existed at all. Doctors argue about what might have taken young Molly away. Plague and famine were common up to the mid-17th Century and by Molly’s heyday, just a few decades later, the population of Dublin was about 55,000. Half of the

2,200 deaths a year were associated with fever. The biggest single killer was smallpox, so that’s where my money is. There was little interest in providing healthcare for the sick poor, and the powers-that-be seemed more concerned with fining unlicensed practitioners for treating them (£5 a month was the penalty) than actually caring for this population themselves. Without even a medical card, poor Molly never stood a chance.

Dr Maurice Gueret is editor of the

Irish Medical Directory’ drmauricegueret.com