Mullein History and Traditional Use
Table of Contents
- Botanical Naming and the Many Folk Names
- Ancient Greece and Rome
- Medieval and European Folk Medicine
- Native American Traditions
- The Eclectic Physicians and 19th-Century America
- Appalachian Folk Medicine
- Consumption and the Pre-Antibiotic Era
- Mullein in the Western Materia Medica
- Cultural, Protective, and Magical Lore
- From Tradition to Modern Research
- Research Papers and References
- Connections
- Featured Videos
Botanical Naming and the Many Folk Names
Mullein is the common English name for Verbascum thapsus L., a tall biennial of the figwort family (Scrophulariaceae) native to Europe, North Africa, and Asia and now naturalized across temperate North America. Botanists call it great mullein or common mullein to distinguish it from the roughly 250 to 360 other species in the genus Verbascum. The Linnaean species epithet thapsus is usually traced to the ancient town of Thapsos in Sicily (or a like-named settlement in North Africa), a reminder that the plant has been catalogued and named since classical antiquity. The Turker and Gurel review of Verbascum thapsus notes that the plant's long human association is reflected in the unusually large number of vernacular names it has accumulated across cultures and centuries.
Few plants carry so many evocative folk names, and almost every one encodes an observed use or a physical feature. The first-year plant forms a low rosette of large, pale, densely woolly leaves — soft as flannel — which gave rise to velvet dock, flannel leaf, beggar's blanket, Adam's flannel, and feltwort. In its second year it throws up a single rigid flowering spike that can exceed two metres, earning Aaron's rod, shepherd's club, hag's taper, and high taper. The names candlewick plant, torches, and the Latin folk name candela regia (royal candle) all point to the plant's ancient use as a lamp and torch wick, discussed below.
The broad, absorbent leaves account for the most memorable modern American nickname, cowboy toilet paper (also "cowboy's toilet paper" or, in earlier rural usage, "rag paper") — a practical campsite use that persists in hiking and bushcraft lore. Other regional names include bunny's ears, old man's flannel, lungwort (a name shared with several other respiratory herbs), and quaker rouge, from the folk practice of reddening the cheeks by rubbing them with the irritant-haired leaf. This dense cloud of names is itself a kind of historical record: it tells us the plant was familiar enough, useful enough, and widespread enough to be re-christened by nearly every community that lived alongside it.
Ancient Greece and Rome
Mullein's documented medicinal career begins in the classical Mediterranean. The Greek physician and pharmacologist Dioscorides, writing his De Materia Medica in the first century CE, described Verbascum (which he grouped under names rendered as phlomos or phlomis) and recommended decoctions of the root and leaves for coughs and pulmonary complaints, for diarrhoea, and as a topical application for wounds, eye inflammation, and toothache. His near-contemporary Pliny the Elder catalogued the plant in his Natural History and recorded both medicinal and household uses. These two texts are the headwaters of essentially the entire Western tradition of mullein use; the respiratory and wound-healing indications named by Dioscorides recur, almost unchanged, in herbals written sixteen centuries later. For accessibility these ancient works are named here as historical primary sources rather than as modern citations.
Beyond medicine, the classical world prized mullein as a source of light. The tall dried flower-stalks, rich in pith, were dipped in tallow, suet, or wax and burned as rushlight-style torches and lamp wicks — a use so characteristic that several of the plant's names (candela regia, candlewick plant, torches, hag's taper) descend directly from it. Roman and Greek sources record these tallow-dipped stalks being carried at funerals and used in nocturnal rites; the same dried spikes, simply lit, served as practical garden and field torches. The dual identity — medicine for the lungs and fuel for a flame — is the oldest and most persistent theme in mullein's human story.
Ancient authors also recorded the woolly hairs as a tinder and lamp-wick material in their own right: the soft down stripped from the leaves catches a spark readily and was used to start fires. Together the leaf-wool tinder, the tallow-dipped stalk torch, and the medicinal decoction show that, from the earliest written record, mullein was a thoroughly domesticated plant whose every part had a recognized purpose. The classical inheritance — respiratory remedy, wound dressing, and source of light — was transmitted intact into medieval Europe.
Medieval and European Folk Medicine
Through the medieval and early-modern centuries, mullein passed from the classical authorities into the great European herbals and into everyday country practice. The English herbalist John Gerard, in his Herball of 1597, and later Nicholas Culpeper, in his widely-read The English Physician (1652), both described mullein for coughs, hoarseness, and chest complaints, for diarrhoea and dysentery ("the bloody flux"), for piles, and as a poultice for swellings and skin sores. Culpeper, in his astrological framework, placed the plant under Saturn. These herbals are named here as historical texts; the indications they record map closely onto the modern PubMed ethnobotanical literature on traditional Verbascum thapsus use.
European folk practice extended well beyond the printed page. The leaves were smoked or burned and the smoke inhaled to relieve coughs, asthma, and tightness of the chest — a domestic forerunner of the "asthma cigarettes" sold in later centuries. Flowers steeped in olive oil yielded a soothing preparation dripped into the ear for earache, and the same flower-infused oil was rubbed on chilblains, haemorrhoids, and inflamed skin. A leaf decoction was drunk for diarrhoea and used as a gargle for sore throats. The plant's reliable, gentle, demulcent action on irritated mucous membranes is the common thread linking these scattered uses.
Mullein also kept its practical, non-medicinal roles. Across Europe the dried stalks continued to be made into torches and the leaf-wool into tinder and lamp-wicks well into the early-modern period; in some districts the leaves were laid inside shoes and stockings for warmth and to ease aching feet. This blend of the medicinal and the domestic — cough remedy, ear oil, wound poultice, foot-warmer, and torch — is exactly what one expects of a plant that grew abundantly on every roadside and waste-ground and cost nothing to gather, and it is the European tradition that colonists would carry across the Atlantic.
Native American Traditions
Although Verbascum thapsus is not native to the Americas — it arrived with European settlers and spread rapidly along disturbed ground — many Native American nations adopted the naturalized plant into their own healing practices within a few generations, and a substantial ethnobotanical record documents these uses. The dominant theme, as in Europe, is respiratory. Among the most widely recorded practices was smoking the dried leaf: nations including the Cherokee, the Mohegan, the Menominee, the Potawatomi, and others are documented as smoking dried mullein (sometimes alone, sometimes blended with other herbs) specifically to relieve asthma, chronic coughs, congestion, and bronchial complaints. The herb was also burned so that the smoke could be inhaled by a person with a tight chest.
Beyond inhalation, mullein leaves and roots were prepared as teas and decoctions for coughs, colds, and chest pain, and as soothing topical applications. Poultices of the soft, warmed leaves were applied to bruises, sprains, swollen joints, sores, and inflamed glands; mashed-root and leaf preparations were bound onto wounds and rashes. Several nations used a leaf or root decoction as a wash for skin eruptions and as a remedy for earache, mirroring the European flower-oil tradition. The Navajo (Dine), Iroquois, Abenaki, and Creek are among the many groups whose recorded materia medica includes mullein for respiratory and topical complaints.
That so many distinct nations, working independently and within their own distinct medical systems, converged on mullein chiefly as a lung and chest remedy is a striking instance of parallel ethnobotanical discovery — the same conclusion the Greeks, the medieval European herbalists, and later the American Eclectics all reached about the same soft-leaved roadside weed. Readers should note that historical ethnobotanical records describe past cultural practice and are not modern clinical recommendations, and that smoking any plant material carries its own respiratory risks.
The Eclectic Physicians and 19th-Century America
In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, mullein moved from folk remedy into a formal professional pharmacopoeia through the Eclectic physicians — a reform movement of doctors who built their practice around botanical medicines. Their definitive reference, King's American Dispensatory (the 1898 edition by Harvey Wickes Felter and John Uri Lloyd is the most cited), gave Verbascum thapsus a detailed monograph. King's American Dispensatory is named here as a historical professional text. The Eclectics classified mullein principally as a pulmonary remedy: a demulcent and mild expectorant for coughs, bronchitis, "irritation of the respiratory mucous membranes," hoarseness, and the cough of consumption (the period term for tuberculosis), valued precisely because it soothed without strongly stimulating or purging.
The Dispensatory and allied Eclectic writers also recorded mullein's other classic uses in clinical language: the flowers infused in oil as a specific for earache and for the discharge of chronic otitis; leaf fomentations and poultices for "glandular swellings," mumps, mastitis, haemorrhoids, and inflamed joints; and decoctions for diarrhoea and urinary irritation. Mullein flowers and leaves were listed at various times in the United States Pharmacopoeia and the National Formulary, marking the plant's passage from hedgerow weed to officially recognized drug in the American medical mainstream of the era.
The Eclectic contribution matters historically because it bridged folk tradition and the beginnings of systematic study: these physicians documented dosing, preparation, and indications with comparative precision, and their respiratory, ear, and lymphatic categories anticipate exactly the three areas where modern laboratory and clinical research on mullein has since concentrated. When the Eclectic schools faded in the early twentieth century, much of their accumulated botanical knowledge passed into the surviving regional folk traditions — most durably the folk medicine of Appalachia.
Appalachian Folk Medicine
Nowhere in North America did mullein take deeper root in living folk practice than in Appalachia, where European settler traditions, Eclectic medicine, and Native American knowledge blended into a distinctive regional materia medica that survived well into the twentieth century. Mullein grows abundantly on the disturbed soils, pastures, and roadsides of the southern mountains, making it one of the most accessible "free" medicines available to mountain families, and it was used freely. The leaf, gathered and dried, was the staple: brewed into a tea for coughs, colds, croup, and "congestion of the lungs," and smoked — as in the Native American tradition — for asthma and chronic bronchial trouble.
Appalachian households kept mullein for a wide range of complaints documented by folklorists and oral-history collectors. Flowers steeped in warm oil were the customary home treatment for earache, dripped into the aching ear. Warmed, softened leaves were bound on as poultices for swollen glands, sprains, bruises, sore joints, boils, and "risings" (abscesses). Leaf teas and washes were used for sore throats (as a gargle), for diarrhoea, for haemorrhoids, and as a fomentation over an inflamed chest. The fresh leaf was the proverbial mountain substitute for toilet paper, and dried stalks still served as kindling and rough torches.
What makes the Appalachian record historically valuable is its continuity: many of these practices were still being actively used and recalled within living memory and were captured directly from practitioners by twentieth-century ethnographic projects, providing an unusually well-attested link between the classical and Eclectic written tradition and present-day herbalism. The respiratory, ear, and lymphatic uses preserved in Appalachian folk medicine are, once again, precisely the indications that carry forward into the modern Western herbal tradition.
Consumption and the Pre-Antibiotic Era
To understand why mullein mattered so much to so many people, it helps to remember what respiratory illness meant before antibiotics. For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tuberculosis — called consumption, phthisis, or simply "the white plague" — was the leading cause of death in the United States and across Europe. It killed slowly and publicly, with a relentless cough, breathlessness, night sweats, wasting, and the sign that nineteenth-century families dreaded most: blood in the sputum. Whole households and communities were touched by it, and a physician of the day, however skilled, had no cure to offer.
Because there was no cure, care meant comfort and time. The standard medical answer was the sanatorium — months or years of bed rest, fresh mountain or pine air, sunlight, and careful feeding, in the hope that the body might wall the disease off on its own. Alongside this, ordinary people reached for the gentle botanical remedies they could grow, gather, or buy cheaply, and for diseases of the lung and cough mullein stood at the very front of that line. Its appeal was exactly its character: a soft, mucilaginous leaf that soothed the raw, ceaseless cough, eased tightness in the chest, and could be taken again and again without harm, day after day, through an illness that lasted months.
Mullein was used for consumption in three classic ways. It was drunk as a tea or decoction of the dried leaf; it was smoked, the dried leaf burned and the smoke drawn in to quiet spasmodic coughing and asthma — a practice American settlers shared with many Native American nations; and, most famously in Ireland and Britain, it was boiled in milk. The traditional Irish preparation simmered about an ounce of fresh or dried leaves in a pint of milk and gave it to the patient twice a day, the milk both carrying the soothing constituents and adding nourishment to a wasting body. So trusted was this remedy that mullein was cultivated on a commercial scale in Ireland and sold in chemists' shops specifically for tuberculosis, right up until the antimycobacterial drugs of the 1940s and 1950s made it unnecessary.
This was not only a kitchen remedy. In the late nineteenth century Dr. Quinlan of St. Vincent's Hospital in Dublin recorded mullein as a trusted popular treatment for consumption and reported a small case series in which most patients — by one account six of seven — improved using smoked mullein or mullein tea. In the United States the Eclectic physicians wrote mullein into King's American Dispensatory as a remedy for "the cough of consumption," and the leaf and flower were recognized in the period's formularies. For a disease that medicine could not defeat, a soothing, abundant, nearly free herb that made breathing easier and the cough more bearable was genuinely valuable — not as a cure, but as comfort.
The long era of mullein-and-rest ended within a single generation. On 19 October 1943, in Selman Waksman's laboratory at Rutgers University, the graduate student Albert Schatz (with Elizabeth Bugie) isolated streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis; it was given to a critically ill tuberculosis patient for the first time on 20 November 1944, with dramatic effect. Earlier wonder drugs had been useless against this particular germ — the sulfonamides and even penicillin could not touch the tubercle bacillus — so streptomycin, soon joined by isoniazid (1952) and rifampin, was revolutionary. For the first time in human history, tuberculosis was curable. The sanatoria emptied, and the centuries-old reliance on remedies like mullein faded from mainstream medicine, surviving in folk practice and, later, in renewed scientific curiosity.
It is important to be clear and honest about what this history does and does not mean, because real people with serious lung disease read pages like this one. Mullein did not cure tuberculosis; antibiotics did, and still do. What mullein offered — and still offers — is supportive comfort: it soothes an irritated, coughing airway and helps make breathing feel a little easier. That is a real and humane benefit for everyday coughs, bronchial irritation, and the misery of a lingering cold, and it is the role mullein deserves today — a gentle companion to proper medical care, never a replacement for it. Anyone with a cough lasting more than a few weeks, who coughs up blood, or who has fever, night sweats, unexplained weight loss, chest pain, or real difficulty breathing should see a clinician: tuberculosis and other serious respiratory diseases are now diagnosable and curable, and early treatment saves lives. Encouragingly, the rise of drug-resistant tuberculosis has sent researchers back to these old anti-tubercular plants — the 2011 review pointedly titled What's in a Name? Can Mullein Weed Beat TB Where Modern Drugs Are Failing? revisits mullein's historical reputation in exactly this light, and laboratory work on its antibacterial constituents continues.
Mullein in the Western Materia Medica
Modern Western herbalists inherit all of these strands and organize mullein's traditional indications into three principal categories. The first and foremost is respiratory: mullein leaf is classed as a demulcent, relaxing expectorant, and mild antitussive, used for dry irritable coughs, bronchitis, tracheitis, hoarseness, and the wet, productive cough where a gentle clearing action is wanted. The leaf's mucilage soothes inflamed airway membranes while saponins are held to help loosen and move phlegm — the same soothe-and-clear logic Dioscorides and the Eclectics described. Mullein leaf tea and tincture remain a mainstay of contemporary herbal respiratory blends.
The second category is ear health. Mullein flower infused in oil — very often combined with garlic — is the classic traditional preparation for the discomfort of earache and acute otitis (always with the standing caution that drops must never be used if the eardrum may be perforated, and that genuine infection warrants medical care). This flower-oil tradition runs in an unbroken line from medieval Europe through the Eclectics and Appalachia into the present day and is among the most recognizable of all herbal home remedies.
The third category is lymphatic and topical. Western herbalists employ mullein leaf as a mild lymphatic and anti-inflammatory for swollen glands and boggy, congested tissue, and use leaf poultices and fomentations over swollen joints, bruises, sprains, and inflamed skin — the direct descendant of the European and Native American poultice tradition. Across all three categories the consistent character of the plant is the same: gentle, soothing, low in toxicity, and well suited to repeated domestic use, which is precisely why it survived the transition from classical drug to folk staple to modern materia-medica herb.
Cultural, Protective, and Magical Lore
Alongside its medicine, mullein gathered a thick layer of cultural, protective, and magical lore, much of it growing out of its use as a torch. Because the dried, tallow-dipped stalk burned as a funeral and ritual torch in the classical and medieval worlds, mullein became associated with funerals, with the dead, and with lighting the way through darkness — the names hag's taper and witch's candle reflect a belief that the plant's torches were carried, or shunned, in connection with night-time gatherings and witchcraft. In European folk belief the plant was simultaneously a tool of witches and a charm against them, a common ambivalence for strongly "light-bearing" plants.
As a protective herb, mullein was hung in homes and barns, carried, or strewn to ward off evil spirits, curses, nightmares, and malevolent magic, and to guard against wild animals; sprigs were tucked into clothing or under pillows for safety and to drive away bad dreams. Classical legend even held that Ulysses (Odysseus) carried mullein as protection against the enchantments of Circe, an attribution repeated in later herb-lore. In folk-magical traditions the dried, powdered leaves were sometimes used as a substitute for graveyard dust in protective and banishing work, again tying the plant to the boundary between the living and the dead.
A separate strand of lore is divinatory and amorous: in parts of Europe a leaning mullein stalk was read as pointing toward a sweetheart's home, and the plant featured in love charms and in folk weather-prediction. The everyday cosmetic trick behind the name quaker rouge — reddening the cheeks by rubbing them with the irritant-haired leaf — sits at the practical end of the same broad cultural fascination. Taken together, this body of lore shows that mullein was never merely a drug or a fuel; it was woven into the symbolic life of the communities that used it, a status reserved for only the most familiar and useful plants.
From Tradition to Modern Research
The remarkable feature of mullein's history is how precisely the traditional record anticipates the modern scientific one. For two thousand years, independent cultures — classical Mediterranean physicians, medieval European herbalists, dozens of Native American nations, the American Eclectics, and Appalachian mountain families — converged on the same small set of uses: soothing the lungs and cough, calming the painful ear, and reducing topical and glandular swelling. The Turker and Gurel review of Verbascum thapsus set out to ask whether laboratory and clinical research supports this inherited reputation, and a growing body of phytochemical and pharmacological work has begun to supply mechanistic explanations for it.
Modern analysis has identified the plant's major constituent classes — mucilage and polysaccharides (the basis of its demulcent, soothing action), iridoid glycosides such as aucubin, the saponin verbascosaponin, flavonoids including verbascoside (acteoside), and phenylethanoid glycosides — and studies have reported antibacterial, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant activities in laboratory models that plausibly underlie the traditional respiratory, ear, and lymphatic uses. The historical claim is, in other words, no longer merely traditional: it now has a chemical address. The detailed chemistry, the named compounds, and the laboratory and clinical evidence are taken up in the companion Active Compounds and Pharmacology article, while the practical respiratory, ear, and dosage uses are covered in the Respiratory and Lung Health, Ear Health and Ear Infections, and Forms, Dosage and Safety articles.
The thread that runs from Dioscorides' first-century decoction through the smoke of a Cherokee asthma remedy, the pages of King's American Dispensatory, and a modern phytochemistry laboratory is unbroken. Tradition raised the questions; research is now testing the answers. That continuity — a humble, abundant weed used the same way across continents and millennia, and only now being explained — is what makes the history of mullein worth knowing for anyone interested in how folk medicine becomes modern pharmacology.
Research Papers and References
The list below combines the key peer-reviewed reviews of Verbascum thapsus with curated PubMed topic-search links into the ethnobotanical and historical literature. Historical primary texts (Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, Pliny's Natural History, Gerard's and Culpeper's herbals, and King's American Dispensatory) are named in the article as historical sources rather than as modern citations. Each link opens at PubMed (National Library of Medicine) in a new tab.
- Turker AU, Gurel E. Common mullein (Verbascum thapsus L.): recent advances in research. Phytotherapy Research. 2005;19(9):733-739. — doi:10.1002/ptr.1653
- Review of the genus Verbascum / Verbascum thapsus — phytochemistry and pharmacology. Phytotherapy Research. — doi:10.1002/ptr.7393
- McCarthy E, O'Mahony JM. What's in a Name? Can Mullein Weed Beat TB Where Modern Drugs Are Failing? Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2011;2011:239237. — doi:10.1155/2011/239237
- The Use of the Mullein Plant in the Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption (historical reprint, U.S. National Library of Medicine) — PMC: Mullein in Pulmonary Consumption
- Streptomycin and the history of tuberculosis treatment (Waksman and Schatz; the end of the sanatorium era) — PubMed: streptomycin and the history of TB treatment
- Verbascum thapsus and antimycobacterial / anti-tubercular activity — PubMed: Verbascum thapsus antimycobacterial activity
- Verbascum thapsus ethnobotany and traditional use — PubMed: Verbascum thapsus ethnobotany traditional use
- Mullein historical and folk medicinal use — PubMed: mullein folk medicine history
- Native American ethnobotanical use of Verbascum — PubMed: Verbascum Native American ethnobotany
- Appalachian and Eclectic botanical materia medica — PubMed: Appalachian folk medicine materia medica
- Verbascum thapsus respiratory and antitussive traditional use — PubMed: Verbascum thapsus respiratory cough
- Verbascum thapsus phytochemistry — verbascoside, aucubin, mucilage — PubMed: Verbascum thapsus phytochemistry
- Verbascum antibacterial and antiviral activity — PubMed: Verbascum thapsus antibacterial antiviral
- Mullein flower oil and ear / otitis traditional use — PubMed: mullein ear otitis flower oil
External Authoritative Resources
- NCCIH — Herbs at a Glance
- MedlinePlus — Herbs and Supplements
- PubMed — All research on Verbascum thapsus
Connections
- Mullein Hub
- Mullein for Respiratory & Lung Health
- Mullein for Ear Health & Infections
- Mullein Forms, Dosage & Safety
- Mullein Active Compounds & Pharmacology
- Echinacea
- All Herbs