Male Fern
If You Read Nothing Else
One of the most historically significant anti-parasitic plants in world medicine.
Read the whole guide on one page →Contains filicin and related compounds that are potentially toxic in overdose.
Included here for heritage and educational completeness — not as a self-care recommendation.
Male fern (Dryopteris filix-mas) is a tall, upright woodland fern. For centuries, its rhizome was one of the world's most relied-on plant medicines for expelling intestinal tapeworms. You'll find it in Avicenna's Canon, the Greek Materia Medica of Dioscorides, and the British Pharmacopoeia well into the 20th century. Today, safer pharmaceutical anthelmintics have replaced internal medicinal use almost everywhere, so male fern is taught mainly as historical and ethnobotanical knowledge.
Known to botanists as Dryopteris filix-mas (Dryopteridaceae).