From medicinal plant to noxious weed: Bryonia alba L. (Cucurbitaceae) in northern and eastern Europe.

The short version

This historical review examined Bryonia alba (white bryony), a vine in the cucumber family, tracing its use across northern and central-eastern Europe from antiquity through the twentieth century. The authors, an ethnobiologist and an ethnologist, worked from written and oral sources rather than a clinical study, covering Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and the Balkans. White bryony's root closely resembles the root of mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), a plant with an extensive European magical and medicinal reputation; the paper's central finding is that this resemblance let bryony function as mandrake's cheaper stand-in, inheriting much of its folklore in the process. Rather than enrolling participants, the authors searched historical floras, pharmacopoeias, ethnographic monographs, and travel accounts for every mention of the plant, then sorted findings into categories: ritual and folk-belief use, food, folk and historical medicine, ethnoveterinary practice, and ornamental planting. They cross-checked, where sources allowed, whether a given account referred to B. alba or its close relative B. dioica, and separated practices documented only in printed herbals ("booklore") from those recorded as living oral tradition passed between households. Across independent sources, root preparations were repeatedly recorded for oedema (fluid swelling, called dropsy at the time), convulsions and epilepsy, intestinal worms, wounds, and rheumatic pain — a 1792 Swedish account describes juice collected from a hollowed-out root curing oedema and treating worms, convulsions and headache, while twentieth- and twenty-first-century accounts from Serbia and Kosovo describe the same root used as a purgative, diuretic and topical anti-rheumatic agent. The authors cite phytochemical literature attributing these effects to cucurbitacins (bitter plant compounds), also linked elsewhere to antitumor activity, while stating plainly that historical claims for epilepsy specifically lack sufficient supporting study. Toxicity is dose- and season-dependent: freshly harvested summer root contains the more toxic cucurbitacin I, and the berries carry a cited lethal dose of roughly 15 for a child and 40 for an adult. The authors report that medicinal use had become obsolete across Scandinavia, Germany and western Slavic regions by the twentieth century, surviving only in isolated Balkan communities in Serbia and Kosovo. The authors present this decline as an unusual case: a plant of substantial historical medicinal and magical importance that today survives mainly as an ornamental garden relic or, in North America, as an unrelated invasive weed. Because the review synthesizes historical and ethnographic records rather than testing the plant directly, it offers no controlled data on safety or effectiveness, and the authors themselves flag some recorded folklore as possibly the invention of root sellers rather than genuine tradition. Future work, the authors suggest, could extend this same source-based method to B. dioica across German-, Latin- and Celtic-speaking Europe.

Key findings

• Bryonia alba, called white bryony, is a European vine in the cucumber family (Cucurbitaceae) whose root and berries were used in folk and historical medicine for well over a thousand years before falling out of use in most of Europe during the twentieth century.
• Historical and ethnographic records from Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Romania describe the root being used for swelling caused by fluid buildup (oedema, historically called dropsy), seizures, intestinal worms, wounds, and joint or muscle pain (rheumatism).
• White bryony's root looks similar to the root of mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), a far more famous magical and medicinal plant, and the review's authors conclude that bryony was commonly sold as a cheaper substitute for mandrake, inheriting much of mandrake's folklore in the process.
• The plant contains cucurbitacins, bitter compounds that prior laboratory research has linked to anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor activity, but the review's authors state plainly that historical claims of effectiveness against epilepsy specifically are not backed by enough modern research.
• The berries are genuinely toxic — the review cites a lethal dose of about 15 berries for a child and 40 for an adult — and folk medicinal use of the plant has survived only in isolated communities in Serbia and Kosovo, while elsewhere in Europe it is now grown mainly as an ornamental plant or treated as a weed.

Common questions