DIGITALIS: THE FOXGLOVE’S MEDICINE


By Ann Pulsford


On Dartmoor the foxglove Digitalis purpurea is a common flower in May, June and July growing on the open moorland or in the crevices in moorstone walls or dry ditches. The pink to purple spires of flowers make it one of the most attractive and noticeable of all wild flowers. It thrives in dry, acid soil and is also cultivated in gardens. Its name foxglove has been attributed in folklore to the flower bells, which were said to glove a fox’s toes and render him silent when stalking his prey. It is also thought to be a corruption of the words folk glove.


However, its most famous contribution is to modern medicine, in the extract digitalis, which is widely used in the treatment of heart disease. Some of the best known drugs to control heart disease today are Digitoxin and Digoxin and based on digitalis extract. They work by increasing the intensity of the heart muscle contractions but diminishing the heart rate, at doses as low as 0.3 mg.


18 Whats On 2012


known and used in medicine for centuries, but the man credited with the introduction of digitalis to the scientific practice of medicine was the eighteenth century physician, William Withering. He was born in Wellington Shropshire in 1741, gaining his medical degree in 1766. In 1775 one of his patients came to him with a very bad heart condition for which Withering had no effective treatment. The patient then went to a local gypsy and after taking her secret herbal remedy got much better. After much bargaining with her he found that the remedy was made from a herbal concoction, but the active ingredient was derived from the leaves of the purple foxglove Digitalis purpurea. The plant is poisonous and should not be ingested.


Withering went on to make a careful scientific study of 163 patients with congestive heart failure (dropsy) and recorded his results very carefully. He realised the paramount importance of the therapeutic dose. In 1785 he published ‘An Account of the foxglove and some of its medical


The foxglove plant had been


uses’. It was a notable advance based on careful clinical observation. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1785 and was the richest doctor outside London. The following year he leased Edgbaston Hall in Birmingham, and owned the first water closet in the city. In 1787 he was elected Fellow of the Linnean Society in recognition of his contribution to botany and the plant Witheringia solanacea was named in his honour and he became known as the English Linneaeus.


He died in 1799, at the early age of 58 from tuberculosis but had made a great contribution to natural philosophy in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. Withering’s contribution was to realise the crucial importance of dosage and to place the extract from Digitalis on a proper scientific footing and eliminate it from folklore and superstition. He is buried in Edgbaston old church and his memorial is carved with a foxglove.


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