Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I was talking to this woman one day and since the wasps are very aggressive this time of year, we started talking about wasp stings. I’d said that I seemed to be getting more and more sensitive to them. My recovery time after getting stung is getting longer and I seem to have more difficulty breathing afterwards.

I hadn’t had many encounters with stings before. I’d had the odd yellow jacket sting and a few bee stings as a child, but since moving here, it has become something that happens fairly often.

“Well, there were a traveler who were visiting when I was a girl.” She said to me.

“I got stung right bad by a big ole wasp and he took a root out of his pocket and told me to chew on a piece of it. H’it’ were shaped just like a rattlesnake’s rattler and he called it snakeroot. I took just a bead off of it and chewed it and was all better very soon.”

She identified the root as being snakeroot.

Well, there are a gang of plants called “snakeroot’. Most of them got the name by being considered a treatment for snakebite at one time or another.

I’ve been trying to find her snakeroot based on her description of the shape of the root, but have come up empty. There are several possible candidates.


The most obvious would be Aristolochia serpentaria or Virginia Snakeroot.


James Mooney says in his Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee which lists some of the plants used locally:

UNASTE’TSITIYU ~ “very small root” ~ Aristolochia serpentaria – Virginia or black snakeroot: Decoction of root blown upon patient for fever and feverish headache, and drunk for coughs; root chewed and spit upon wound to cure snake bites; bruised root placed in hollow tooth for toothache, and held against nose made sore by constant blowing in colds. Dispensatory: “A stimulant tonic, acting also as a diaphoretic or diuretic, according to the mode of its application; ***also been highly recommended in intermittent fevers and though itself generally inadequate to the cure often proves serviceable as an adjunct to Peruvian bark or sulphate of quinia.” Also used for typhous diseases, in dyspepsia, as a gargle for sore throat, as a mild stimulant in typhoid fevers, and to promote eruptions. The genus derives its scientific name from its supposed efficacy in promoting menstrual discharge, and some species have acquired the “reputation of antidotes for the bites of serpents.”

But Virginia snakeroot doesn’t have the root structure of the plant I’m looking for.

I’m thinking a much better candidate would be Polygala senega L. or Seneca Snakeroot. This plant would have the root structure I’m looking for and has a common name of “rattlesnake root”. It’s a much better fit. I’ve seen both of these plants growing here in the mountains and know they would be available.

But I’m still sort of bemused as to why either would be given for a wasp sting, unless there was some sort of respiratory distress involved. I can see a sort of sympathetic magic justification for the Seneca. And wasp stings are self -limiting as long as there is no allergic reaction.

What do you think? Any herbalists out there with any ideas as to what she was talking about?

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Disclaimer! Please don't try to go and recreate any of the traditional cures that I talk about on the blog unless you are quite sure you know what you are doing and take full responsibility for doing so. I just collect them. I don't actually use them. Some herbs previously in common use have been found to have harmful effects. And some of them are quite deadly.