“That They May Vomit Out Their Folly”: The Gut-Mind Axis and Hellebore in Early Modern England

Abstract This article explores the early modern understanding of gut-mind relationship through a study beliefs and practices surrounding hellebore plant in seventeenth-century England. Hellebore has been strongly associated with mental illness for most recorded European history, it is only during past two centuries that lost this association. Taking phenomenological approach, I demonstrate specific plant, its representations, significant not just to folklorists medical historians but also wider histories culture, religion, emotion, body. The use as treatment disorders mind reveals fully embodied view emotion which gut played key role shaping subjective experience. It reflects potently negative excremental matter, something inherently impure, dangerous, evil, warranting violent remedy was punitive therapeutic. By analyzing sources—herbals, pharmacopoeias, practitioners’ casebooks, domestic receipt books—alongside devotional literature religious polemic, show hellebore's symbolic importance inseparable from practical illness, depended upon an identity accorded vital significance between belly brain.