elecampane

   The roots of this plant were widely used in folk medicine and particularly veterinary medicine - for curing hydrophobia in cows and skin diseases in horses and sheep. In Wiltshire, at least, the plant was called 'Horseheal' (Wiltshire, 1975: 18). For human use, the traditional ways of processing the plant often involved mixing with sugar, honey, or wine. In this form it eventually became available as a sweet, and the name lived on even after the plant ceased to be an ingredient:

   So now its medical virtues are forgotten, and it is sold merely as a candy in confectioners' shops, with no more of the plant in it than there is of barley in what is now sold as barley-sugar.

   One writer in Notes & Queries equates elecampane with the liquorish-concoction made and drunk by children on a special day in certain parts of the country (see under *Spanish Sunday).The other way in which the plant is remembered, after a fashion, is in the Doctor's speech in many versions of the *mummers play, in which the name is garbled in all manner of ways (such as Allikan-pane or Hokum-pokum-hellican-pain) but it is quite clear that elecampane was the 'original' word used.

   ■ Vickery, 1995: 126; N&Q4s:5 (1870), 595; 4s:6 (1870), 103, 205, 264; 4s:7 (1871), 243, 314.