gourd in wine

Original passage

The pulp of this fruit, taken with wormwood and salt, is a remedy for toothache, and the juice of it, warmed with vinegar, has the effect of strengthening loose teeth. Rubbed in with oil, it removes pains of the spine, loins, and hips: in addition to which, really a marvellous thing to speak of! the seeds of it, in even numbers, attached to the body in a linen cloth, will cure, it is said, the fevers to which the Greeks have given the name of “periodic.” The juice, too, of the cultivated gourd¹ shred in pieces, applied warm, is good for ear-ache, and the flesh of the inside, used without the seed, for corns on the feet and the suppurations known to the Greeks as “apostemata.” When the pulp and seeds are boiled together, the decoction is good for strengthening loose teeth, and for preventing toothache; wine, too, boiled with this plant², is curative of defluxions of the eyes. The leaves of it, bruised with fresh cypress-leaves, or the leaves alone, boiled in a vessel of potters’ clay and beaten up with goose-grease, and then applied to the part affected, are an excellent cure for wounds. Fresh shavings of the rind are used as a cooling application for gout, and burning pains in the head, in infants more particularly; they are good, too, for erysipelas, whether it is the shavings of the rind or the seeds of the plant that are applied to the part affected. The juice of the scrapings, employed as a liniment with rose-oil and vinegar, moderates the burning heats of fevers; and the ashes of the dried fruit applied to burns are efficacious in a most remarkable degree.

Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 4 (of 6): Books XVIII–XXIII, translated by John Bostock; H. T. Riley (1856 edition) · Book 20, chapter 8 · THE COLOCYNTHIS: TEN REMEDIES. · lines 8440–8463 · passage pliny-nh:b20:c008:002