The Nature of Eureka: Boneset – A forgotten herb

Here in the woods of northern Maine, I see a plant that I also see alongside ponds in the Ozarks. It is called boneset. In much of eastern North America, decades ago when cold and flu season came around, you wouldn’t look for a bottle of echinacea, you would probably make a tea of the leaves of boneset, an herb collected during late summer of the previous year. This widespread plant of wet soils, Eupatorium perfoliatum, likely hung from the kitchen rafters of many colonial homes, awaiting the next bout of a sniffly nose or upper respiratory tract infection. The plant never made it to herbal tea ingredient status as the flavor, well, tastes like medicine.

The medical profession paid little attention to it in the early days of America because it was largely a domestic remedy, an herb used by the people. But after the American Revolution, in the early 19th century there was a concerted academic movement to develop an uniquely American materia medica, or as one writer put it, “Why go to Europe’s bloody shores for plants which grow at our own doors?”

Known as thoroughwort, Indian sage, crosswort, vegetable antimony, and boneset, it is found from Canada to Florida and westward into the prairie states. As a domestic remedy and native American herb it had a familiar reputation as a treatment for fevers of all sorts (earning the name ague-weed), and in some places resorted to as a treatment for yellow fever. The real test came in using the plant for treatment of the transient poor at the New York Alms-house, the equivalent of today’s homeless shelter. It was an important and remedy in the treatment of most fevers, particularly malaria.

During a flu epidemic of 1891, and the flu pandemic of 1918-19, boneset was widely used by Eclectic physicians in the U.S., with reported good success. Today, the herb continues to garner a reputation in the obscure world of herbalists as an immunostimulant, mild pain-reliever, and fever-reducer in colds, flu, and other conditions accompanied with aches and pains. Science continues to explore what this herb of many possibilities.