A plant with white or pink flowers, traditionally used in folk medicine to treat fevers and injuries, believed to help healing of broken bones.
Compound of 'bone' + 'set,' referring to the plant's historical use in treating fractures. The common name reflects folk belief rather than scientific evidence; the plant's actual botanical name is Eupatorium perfoliatum.
Native Americans and Appalachian healers used boneset for centuries before modern medicine, and they called it 'feverwort' because it worked better for fevers than broken bones—yet the misleading name stuck! This shows how folk names sometimes preserve what people *thought* plants did rather than what they actually did.
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