Gotu Kola: A Highly Improbable Story and A Dark Mystery

Centella asiatica

Butter your popcorn, traveller. We are about to enter a dark forest full of intrigue; this is how the use of C. asiatica to treat leprosy came to be. It all started with a desperate doctor… a doctor named Boileau.

I shirtlessly pluck this golden harp and gently cast your minds back to the 1800's.

Disfigured by the ravages of the most infamous of biblical scourges, Dr. Boileau had worked tirelessly, for years, on the French island of Mauritius to find a cure for leprosy. Running short on time and desperate for answers, Boileau received word of a miraculous plant called Chinchunchilly in the Americas that had the ability to cure himself — and his many patients — of their affliction.

Many letters and inquiries later, however, Dr. Boileau was unable to procure this would-be cure. It seems no merchant or apothecary trading in the southern Americas had ever heard of Chinchunchilly. Perhaps this plant was a mere invention… a miracle cure with a conditional identity depending only on the degree of cruelty of the merchant?

Boileau limped into his garden and struggled to maintain composure. Resting momentarily on his gnarled and knotted cane, thinking of a gentle way to break the hope of his ailing patients, he spotted a plant in his yard… a plant that that seemed to resemble Chinchunchilly… or at least the image of Chinchunchilly living in his mind.

Did it? Yes. YES! It did! Was it was a sign?! This plant, perhaps, this Bevilaqua could be used to ease this bane of living.

Dr. Boileau first tested himself with the Bevilaqua plant in small, yet, steadily increasing doses. To his astonishment, his health began to improve in kind. His voice, normally shredded, regained clarity. His lesion-pocked hide became soft and supple again. His feet, once rotting silhouettes of their former shapes, had regained their composition. No levee could contain Boileau’s excitement now.

He immediately began treatment on his 57 patients, and soon, all 57 of his long-suffering kindred souls were pulled back from the border between life and death; every single one. What was once a dark forest of moaning and disease-knotted humanity, started to bloom with life once again. Fortune had finally smiled on the island of Mauritius.

Growing eager to exile leprosy from his island — maybe the World — for good, Dr. Boileau increased his own dosage many fold to 3 grams Bevilaqua. Perhaps, he thought, the threshold to a cure would then be crossed. Dr. Boileau, in all his well-intentioned hubris, was mistaken.

Boileau’s muscles began quaking and suddenly began seizing in stone grips of agony that caused him to shriek sounds devoid of all humanity. Between shocks of anguish, his breathing became labored and his heart jumbled in his chest as if it were a failing combustion engine… sputtering. Blood oozed from his nose as Boileau laid languid in a sweat soaked canvas gown. Later that day, as a gush of blood lazily poured from his anus, those in his presence knew; Dr. Boileau was dying.

Yet, by some miracle and number of days, Boileau turned the corner. Life had returned to his waiting corpse. He had lived another three years in obscurity having found the proper dosage of Centella asiatica to effectively treat leprosy and saved the lives of 57 patients who once awaited their own reapers.

Years later, an apothecary toiling through case studies found Boileau’s harrowing and heroic account. The man, named only Lepine, determined that “Bevilaqua” could only be Hydrocotyle asiática, a non-toxic and ubiquitous edible plant occurring in throughout the tropics of the world.

Now, there are many problems with this story. Why would Lepine identify the plant as an edible species if 3 grams nearly killed Dr. Boileau? Why do these people only have one name? What is Dr. Boileau a doctor of? Why would a doctor of medicine use plant vernacular names instead of binomials and chose a medicine based on cosmetics alone?

DID ALL OF THIS REALLY HAPPEN?!?! DID THESE PEOPLE EVEN EXIST?

Surprisingly, the answer to the latter question is, yes, they seem to have been real people, however, Dr. Boileau and Lepine may not have been who they seemed to be.

Story to be continued at www.pullupyourplants.com

I’ll keep you guys on Medium up to date though.

For more information on Centella asiatica, follow this link.

By Kevin Healey