CHAP. 72.—THE CHICKPEA AND THE CHICHELING VETCH: TWENTY-THREE REMEDIES.
There is a wild chickpea also, which resembles in its leaf the cultivated kind,2804 and has a powerful smell. Taken in considerable quantities, it relaxes the bowels, and produces griping pains and flatulency; parched, however, it is looked upon as more wholesome. The chicheling vetch,2805 again, acts more beneficially upon the bowels. The meal of both kinds heals running sores of the head—that of the wild sort being the more efficacious of the two—as also epilepsy, swellings of the liver, and stings inflicted by serpents. It acts as an emmenagogue and a diuretic, used in the grain more particularly, and it is a cure for lichens, inflammations of the testes, jaundice, and dropsy. All these kinds, however, exercise an injurious effect upon ulcerations of the bladder and kidneys: but in combination with honey they are very good for gangrenous sores, and the cancer known as “cacoethes.” The following is a method adopted for the cure of all kinds of warts: on the first day of the moon, each wart must be touched with a single chickpea, after which, the party must tie up the pease in a linen cloth, and throw it behind him; by adopting this plan, it is thought, the warts will be made to disappear.
Our authors recommend the plant known as the “arietinum”2806 to be boiled in water with salt, and two cyathi of the decoction to be taken for strangury. Employed in a similar manner, it expels calculi, and cures jaundice. The water in which the leaves and stalks of this plant have been boiled, applied as a fomentation as hot as possible, allays gout in the feet, an effect equally produced by the plant itself, beaten up and applied warm. A decoction of the columbine2807 chickpea, it is thought, moderates the shivering fits in tertian or quartan fevers; and the black kind, beaten up with half a nut-gall, and applied with raisin wine, is a cure for ulcers of the eyes.