Spigelia. Spigelia anthelmia (right), a. Habit, b. Papillae on surface of leaves, greatly enlarged, c. Flower bud. d. Flower, side view. e. Flower, longitudinally dissected, f. Floral diagram, g. Fruit, h. Seed. Drawn by Priscilla Fawcett. From Correll and Correll 1982. Spigelia marylandica (left). From Britton and Brown 1897.

John Ray in 1704 was one of the first to mention these American herbs in his Historia plantarum. He called them Periclymeni virginiani flore coccinea planta marilandica (Virginia honeysuckle with a red flower, plants from Maryland). Probably Ray’s examples were cultivated and no herbarium samples made. Important specimens in Europe were sent there from Charleston by John Clayton in the 1730s. Jan Gronovius used the Clayton specimen, now preserved in the British Museum of Natural History in

London. In his Flora Virginica of 1739-1743, Gronovius called the plants Lonicera spicis terminalibus, foliis ovato-oblongis acu-minatis distinctis sessilibus (Honeysuckle with terminal spikes, and distinctly sessile ovate-oblong and acuminate leaves). Gronovius knew about the medical uses of the plants because he cited Catesby (1734). Catesby had ample opportunity to learn about them because he was in Williamsburg, Virginia, between 1712 and 1719. He returned to England, then went back to Charleston, South Carolina, in May of 1722. Somewhere between 1712 and his return to England in 1726 to publish his book, he learned about the vermifuge properties of “pinkroot” and wrote, “A Decoction made of this Plant is good against Worms” (Catesby 1734). Physician Benjamin Rush, in 1774, considered S. marylandica and S. anthelmia to be “two of the most powerful vermifuge medicines we are acquainted with.”