Rosemary has at times enjoyed a high reputation among medicinal herbs.
Arnold of Villa Nova affirms that he had often seen cancers, gangrenes,
and fistulas, which would yield to no other medicine, dry up and become
perfectly cured by frequently bathing them with a spirituous infusion
of rosemary. His disciple, Raymond Lully, extracted the essential oil
by distillation.
The name probably assisted the fame of the plant. In the middle ages it
was believed to be associated with the Virgin. It was in fact derived
from Ros and Maris, meaning Dew of the Sea; probably because it grew
near the shores of the Mediterranean.
“Here’s rosemary for you; that’s for remembrance.” So says Ophelia in
Hamlet; and many other poets and chroniclers relate how the plant was
used at funerals and weddings as a symbol of constancy. It is supposed
that this signification arose from the medicinal employment of rosemary
to improve the memory. It may easily have happened, however, that the
medicinal use followed the emblematical idea.
Old books and some modern ones tell the legend of the Queen of Hungary
and her rosemary remedy. It is alleged in pharmaceutical treatises
published in the nineteenth century that a document is preserved in the
Imperial Library at Vienna, dated 1235, and written by Queen Elisabeth
of Hungary, thus expressed:--
“I, Elisabeth, Queen of Hungary, being very infirm and much
troubled with gout, in the seventy-second year of my age,
used for a year this recipe given to me by an ancient hermit,
whom I never saw before nor since; and was not only cured
but recovered my strength, and appeared to all so remarkably
beautiful that the King of Poland asked me in marriage, he
being a widower and I a widow. I, however, refused him for
the love of my Lord Jesus Christ, from one of whose angels I
believe I received the remedy.”
The royal formula is as follows:--“Take aqua vitae, four
times distilled, 3 parts; the tops and flowers of rosemary, 2
parts; put these together in a closed vessel, let them stand
in a gentle heat fifty hours, and then distil them. Take one
teaspoonful of this in the morning once every week, and let
your face and diseased limb be washed with it every morning.”
Beckmann investigated this story and came to the conclusion that the
name “Eau de La Reine d’Hongrie” had been adopted by some vendors of
a spirit of rosemary “in order to give greater consequence and credit
to their commodity”; in other words, he suggests that the interesting
narrative was only a clever advertisement.
The only Queen Elisabeth of Hungary was the wife of King Charles
Robert, and daughter of Ladislaus, King of Poland. She died in 1380,
and for more than ten years before that date either her brother,
Casimir II, or her son Louis, was the reigning sovereign in Poland,
and neither of these can be supposed to have been her suitor. The
alleged date of the document quoted would better suit St. Elisabeth of
Hungary, and some old writers attribute the formula and the story to
her. But she was never queen of Hungary, and moreover she died in 1231
at the age of 25. Beckmann also denies the statement that the document
pretended to be in Queen Elisabeth’s writing is preserved in the
Imperial Library at Vienna. The whole narrative is traced to a German
named Hoyer, in 1716, and he apparently copied it from a French medical
writer named Prevot, who published it in 1659. Prevot attributes the
story to “St. Elisabeth, Queen of Hungary,” and says he copied both the
history and the formula from an old breviary in the possession of his
friend, Francis Podacather, a Cyprus nobleman, who had inherited it
from his ancestors. This is the one little possibility of truth in the
record, for it appears that Queen Elisabeth of Hungary did mention two
breviaries in her will, and it may have been that one of these was the
one which the Cyprus nobleman possessed.