Common Lettuce

Parts Usually Used

Juice, leaves

Description of Plant(s) and Culture

Everyone is familiar with common lettuce as it is available in the supermarket, but this is the plant picked before it is fully grown. When allowed to mature, lettuce develops a tall stem with alternate leaves and panicled heads of yellow flowers. Flowering time is June to August. Other varieties: Poison lettuce (L. virosa)(also known as “the poor man’s opium); Wild lettuce (L.

canadensis); Prickly lettuce (L. scariola); another type of Wild lettuce (L. biennis)

Where Found

Cultivated

Medicinal Properties

Anodyne, antispasmodic, expectorant, sedative

Uses

Historical herbalists utilized the milky juice found in mature garden lettuce and related varieties as a calming agent for insomnia, coughs, and cramps. Traditional accounts also noted that eating common salad leaves in the evening was believed to encourage sleep. Herbalists prepared a decoction of the leaves as a topical skin wash, while the juice, combined with oil of roses, was historically applied to the forehead and temples for headaches.

When boiled and consumed, lettuce was traditionally thought to aid digestion, relieve thirst, stimulate milk production in nursing mothers, and soothe bowel pains. The seventeenth-century herbalist Nicholas Culpeper recorded that lettuce was contraindicated for individuals experiencing shortness of breath or lung complaints.

Bibliography

The Complete Medicinal Herbal , by Penelope Ody, Dorling Kindersley, Inc, 232 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, First American Edition, copyright 1993 Culpeper’s Complete Herbal & English Physician: Updated With 117 Modern Herbs , by Nicholas Culpeper, Meyerbooks, publisher, PO Box 427, Glenwood, Illinois 60425, 1990, (reprint of 1814) Eastern/Central Medicinal Plants , by Steven Foster and James A.

, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10000 The Herb Book , by John Lust, Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. copyright 1974. , 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014, first printed by the United States Government Printing Office, Washington, in 1928, this Dover edition 1974 The Magic of Herbs in Daily Living , by Richard Lucas, Parker Publishing Co.

(1988). The Nature Doctor: A Manual of Traditional and Complementary Medicine , by Dr. A. , 27 Pine Street (Box 876) New Canaan, CT. 06840-0876. Copyright Verlag A. , 15 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10023