Mullein (Verbascum thapsus): The 2,400-Year Lung Medicine the Flexner Report Erased From American Pharmacy

What is Mullein?

In the winter of 1882, a 22-year-old woman named Margaret Sullivan was admitted to the Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. She was coughing blood. Her lungs were filling with the bacterial infection that had killed her mother three years earlier and was now killing one in seven Americans every year. The doctors at Trudeau had no antibiotics. Streptomycin would not be discovered for another 62 years.

What they had was rest, fresh mountain air, beef broth, cod liver oil, and one specific plant remedy that had already been used against this disease for 1,800 years. The remedy was a tea brewed from the dried leaves and yellow flowers of a tall, fuzzy plant that grew along every roadside in upstate New York. The Trudeau staff harvested it themselves from the fields outside the sanatorium walls. Margaret Sullivan survived. She was discharged in the spring of 1884 and lived another 47 years.

This is mullein, Verbascum thapsus, also called the Lungwort, the Quaker's Rouge, the Aaron's Rod, and the Bullock's Lungwort. A biennial plant in the figwort family (Scrophulariaceae). In its first year, it grows as a rosette of large silver-green leaves so soft they feel like felt. In the second year, it sends up a single yellow flower spike that can reach 10 feet tall by late summer. A single mature plant produces over 200,000 seeds. It grows in disturbed soil along highways, railroad tracks, abandoned lots, and field edges across every state east of the Mississippi and most of the West. You have driven past it 10,000 times. The global market for prescription respiratory inhalers is worth $92 billion a year. The plant Margaret Sullivan was given is completely free.

2,400 Years of Continuous Use

The archive opens in ancient Greece. Around 2,400 years ago, Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine, prescribes a tall yellow-flowered roadside plant for cough and lung disease. In the 1st century AD, the Greek military physician Pedanius Dioscorides, traveling with the Roman army across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, compiles De Materia Medica, the pharmaceutical reference text that will dominate Western medicine for the next 1,500 years. In Book IV he describes a plant he calls phlomos and prescribes it for lung disorders, persistent coughs, asthma, and what he calls the spitting of blood. That last symptom is what 19th-century Americans would call consumption and what modern doctors call pulmonary tuberculosis. The plant Dioscorides was describing is Verbascum thapsus, the common mullein.

Bullock's Lungwort: Roman Cattle and Medieval Healers

By the 4th century AD, Roman cattlemen across Europe were using mullein to treat respiratory disease in their cows. The English nickname Bullock's Lungwort dates from this period. The plant became so closely associated with respiratory medicine that medieval European healers carried dried mullein leaves the way modern medics carry epinephrine. In the 1653 publication of The Complete Herbal, the English botanist Nicholas Culpeper writes that mullein is "of a peculiar property to ease the chest of all manner of phlegmatic and rheumatic distempers."

Across the Atlantic: The Native American Adoption

Across the Atlantic, in the same century, mullein was already established in North America. European colonists brought the seeds. Native American tribes immediately recognized the medicine. The Cherokee brewed the leaves into tea for coughs and asthma. The Mohegan dried the leaves and smoked them in clay pipes for chest congestion, a practice still preserved in modern herbal smoking blends. The Menominee, the Forest Potawatomi, and the Penobscot all used the smoke from smoldering mullein leaves to relieve asthma attacks. The Navajo and the Coast Salish included it in healing ceremonies. By 1700, mullein was naturalized across every state east of the Mississippi.

1882: The Trudeau Sanatorium

In the 19th century, as American cities filled with immigrants and industrial pollution, tuberculosis became the single largest cause of death in the United States. By 1880, one in seven Americans was dying of consumption. The most famous treatment center was the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium, founded in 1885 by Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau in Saranac Lake, New York. Trudeau's protocol included sunlight, mountain air, high-fat diet, and respiratory herbs. Mullein was a staple. The dried leaves were brewed into tea and given to patients three times a day. By the early 20th century, mullein was an official drug. It was listed in the United States Pharmacopoeia, the legal reference book that defined what American doctors could prescribe. It was listed in the British Pharmacopoeia, the German Pharmacopoeia, and the French Codex. Every doctor trained before 1920 knew it.

Modern Science: Verbascoside, Bronchodilation & the 2021 RCT

For roughly a century after mullein was removed from American medical training, the plant remained outside the laboratory. In the last twenty years that has changed. Researchers in Italy, Spain, Iran, and Germany have systematically tested the plant against modern pharmacological standards. The results have confirmed, in molecular terms, what the doctors of the Trudeau Sanatorium relied on by tradition.

The Mechanism: Saponins, Mucilage, Verbascoside

Mullein contains three classes of compounds that act on respiratory tissue through complementary mechanisms. Saponins in the leaf physically thin and mobilise the thick mucus produced by infected bronchial tissue, the same mechanical effect that guaifenesin (the active ingredient in Mucinex) is licensed for. Mucilage, a polysaccharide gel released when the dried leaf is steeped, coats and soothes the inflamed mucous membranes of the throat and upper airways. Verbascoside, a phenylethanoid glycoside concentrated in the yellow flowers, reduces inflammation through the same biochemical pathway that modern corticosteroid inhalers target.

2010: University of Naples Federico II

A research team led by Carla Speranza at the University of Naples Federico II published a study in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology examining the anti-inflammatory action of verbascoside. They reproduced an inflammatory state in human leukemia cells, then treated the cells with verbascoside. The compound significantly reduced the expression and activity of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), the same inflammatory enzyme that modern corticosteroid asthma medications target. It also reduced the production of superoxide free radicals. The mechanism was identical to anti-inflammatory pharmaceutical action.

2019: University of Salamanca

A Spanish research team led by Alejandra González at the University of Salamanca tested standardized mullein extract on guinea pig tracheal tissue. At a concentration of 100 micrograms per millilitre, the extract produced significant airway relaxation. The mechanism was bronchodilatory, the same physical effect that albuterol produces. The study demonstrated, on isolated mammalian airway smooth muscle, that mullein causes the muscle around the bronchial tubes to relax, opening the airway.

2021: Iranian Clinical Trial in Children

An Iranian clinical trial led by Mohammad Jahan tested mullein syrup against placebo in 40 children with persistent cough. After seven days, the mullein group reported 60 percent greater symptom reduction. The result was statistically significant. This is the first modern randomized controlled trial of mullein for cough in a pediatric population, and the result aligned with 2,400 years of pre-pharmaceutical clinical observation.

1990: German Commission E Approval

The German Commission E, the European regulatory body that evaluated herbal medicines for the German government for over two decades, formally approved mullein flower in 1990 for the treatment of respiratory catarrh. This is one of the most rigorous herbal medicine approvals in Western regulatory history. The FDA has never issued any equivalent recognition. In the United States, mullein remains classified as a dietary supplement. Producers cannot legally make any medical claim about it. But the medicine is still there, and the science is now formal.

Why It Was Buried: The Flexner Report & the Bronchodilator Industry

In 1910, an American educator named Abraham Flexner published a report that would change Western medicine forever. The Flexner Report was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation to evaluate the state of American medical education. Flexner visited 155 medical schools and concluded that most of them were inadequate. His recommendations reshaped American medicine.

Two Generations Trained Out of Plant Medicine

Schools that taught herbal medicine, homeopathy, eclectic medicine, or any approach not based on pharmaceutical chemistry were closed or defunded. By 1920, the number of American medical schools had been cut nearly in half. The schools that survived were the ones that taught the new pharmaceutical model. The Rockefeller Foundation, whose Standard Oil holdings produced the petroleum derivatives used to synthesize the new drugs, funded the survivors directly.

Mullein was removed from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia. It became, officially, not a drug. American doctors stopped learning about it. American pharmacists stopped stocking it. By 1940, two generations of physicians had been trained to consider plant medicine the practice of country doctors and superstitious folk healers. In 1944, streptomycin was discovered. By 1947 it was being mass-produced. Tuberculosis, the disease that had killed Margaret Sullivan's mother and 1 million other Americans a year, became a curable condition. Mullein was no longer needed for TB.

1966: The Albuterol Patent

But asthma, bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and respiratory infection were still everywhere. Smoking had created a generation of damaged lungs. Industrial pollution had created another. By the 1960s, American emergency rooms were filling with people who could not breathe. In 1966, a research team at Allen and Hanburys, a British pharmaceutical subsidiary of Glaxo, synthesized a chemical called salbutamol. Marketed in the United States as albuterol, it was a beta-2 adrenergic receptor agonist that relaxed the smooth muscle around the bronchial tubes in seconds. The FDA approved it in 1981. By the 1990s, it was the standard rescue medication for asthma worldwide. The patented brand name was Ventolin.

The $92 Billion Lung Industry

Today, the global bronchodilator market is worth $23.64 billion per year and projected to reach $32.94 billion by 2034. Albuterol alone generates $4.59 billion annually. The combined market for asthma and COPD therapeutics is $92.30 billion and projected to reach $155.25 billion by 2030. GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Merck, and Boehringer Ingelheim divide this market between them.

A single Ventolin inhaler, before insurance, retails in the United States for between $50 and $80. A typical asthmatic patient uses 12 to 24 inhalers per year, an annual cost of $600 to nearly $2,000. The patent on the original formulation expired in the 2010s, but the price remains high because the pharmaceutical industry has continuously developed new combination inhalers that pair albuterol with corticosteroids and reset the patent clock. The plant that produces the same expectorant action mechanically cannot be patented. We did not lose mullein. We just stopped looking down.

How to Use Mullein (Tea, Oil, Identification)

Identification: The Felted Leaf Test

Mullein is one of the easiest medicinal plants in North America to identify and almost impossible to confuse with anything dangerous. In the first year, it grows as a low rosette of large soft leaves arranged like a flat star against the ground. The leaves are silver-green, 4 to 12 inches long, and covered in fine hairs that feel exactly like felt or velvet. This is the diagnostic feature. No common toxic plant has the same soft felted texture.

In the second year, the plant sends up a single tall flowering stalk reaching 6 to 10 feet, covered in small five-petaled yellow flowers blooming a few at a time from June through September. It grows in disturbed soil along highways, railroad tracks, abandoned lots, gravel pits, and field edges. It thrives in poor compacted soil and needs no water.

Where and When to Harvest

Harvest the leaves in the first year, before the plant flowers, when the medicinal compounds are concentrated. Choose plants growing well away from roadsides and farm fields, since the felted leaves trap dust and chemical residue like a filter. Cut the leaves in the morning after the dew has dried. Hang them in small bunches in a dark, well-ventilated space for two weeks until they are completely dry and crumble easily. Store in an airtight glass jar away from light and humidity. The yellow flowers, harvested in the second year as they open, are even more medicinally valuable than the leaves.

Mullein Tea (For Cough & Bronchial Support)

Use one teaspoon of dried mullein leaf per cup of boiling water. Steep for 10 minutes. Strain the tea through a coffee filter or fine cheesecloth, because the small hairs from the leaves can irritate the throat if not removed. This is the most important step and the one most often skipped. Drink up to three cups per day during respiratory illness. Sweeten with honey if desired, which is itself an old respiratory remedy.

Mullein Flower Oil (For Ear Infections)

The yellow flowers, harvested in the second year, are the most concentrated source of verbascoside. They are traditionally infused in olive oil for two weeks in a sunny window, then strained. The infused oil is the most effective traditional remedy for ear infection, applied a few drops at a time directly into the affected ear. This preparation has been used continuously for at least 1,800 years.

Smoke Inhalation (Traditional Use)

The Mohegan, Menominee, Forest Potawatomi, and Penobscot all used the smoke from smoldering dried mullein leaves to relieve asthma attacks. The dried leaves are still included in modern herbal smoking blends sold for respiratory support. Smoke inhalation is a traditional rather than evidence-based use; it is documented historically but does not appear in modern clinical trials.

Safety

Mullein is one of the safest medicinal herbs known. No serious adverse events have been reported in modern clinical trials, and it has 2,400 years of continuous traditional use. Strain the tea thoroughly to avoid throat irritation from the hairs. Do not harvest from roadsides, parking lots, or farm field edges, since the leaves trap heavy metals and pesticide residue. Mullein seeds contain rotenone and coumarin and should not be ingested; only the leaves and flowers are used medicinally. Pregnancy and breastfeeding data is limited; consult a qualified practitioner. As with any herbal medicine, mullein does not replace medical care for serious respiratory conditions; if you have asthma, COPD, or active pulmonary infection, work with your doctor.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is mullein and what is it used for?

Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) is a tall biennial plant in the figwort family (Scrophulariaceae) that produces a rosette of soft silver-green felted leaves in its first year and a yellow flower spike up to 10 feet tall in its second year. It has been used as a respiratory medicine for at least 2,400 years. Hippocrates prescribed it. Dioscorides catalogued it as phlomos in De Materia Medica around 70 AD. Nicholas Culpeper recommended it in his 1653 English Herbal. The Cherokee, Mohegan, Menominee, Forest Potawatomi, Penobscot, Navajo, and Coast Salish all used it for cough, asthma, and chest congestion. It was an official drug in the US Pharmacopoeia, the British Pharmacopoeia, the German Pharmacopoeia, and the French Codex until the early 20th century. The mechanism is now understood: saponins in the leaf physically thin and mobilise mucus, mucilage coats and soothes inflamed bronchial tissue, and verbascoside in the flowers reduces inflammation through the same biochemical pathway that corticosteroid inhalers target. The German Commission E approved mullein flower in 1990 for respiratory catarrh.

Is mullein really good for the lungs? What does the science say?

The science supports the traditional use. A 2010 study at the University of Naples Federico II (Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology) showed that verbascoside, the principal active compound in mullein flowers, significantly reduces the expression and activity of inducible nitric oxide synthase, the same inflammatory enzyme corticosteroid asthma medications target. A 2019 Spanish study at the University of Salamanca demonstrated airway relaxation in guinea pig tracheal tissue at 100 micrograms per millilitre, a bronchodilatory effect mechanically equivalent to albuterol. A 2021 Iranian randomised clinical trial in 40 children with persistent cough showed 60 percent greater symptom reduction in the mullein group compared to placebo, statistically significant after seven days. The German Commission E formally approved mullein flower in 1990 for respiratory catarrh. The mechanism the doctors of the Trudeau Sanatorium relied on in 1882 is the same mechanism modern pharmacology is now describing in molecular terms.

How do you make mullein tea and what is the correct dose?

Use one teaspoon of dried mullein leaf per cup of boiling water. Steep for 10 minutes. Strain the tea through a coffee filter or fine cheesecloth, because the small hairs from the leaves can irritate the throat if not removed. This is the most important step and the one most often skipped. Drink up to three cups per day during respiratory illness. The leaves are best harvested in the first year, before the plant flowers, when the medicinal compounds are most concentrated. Choose plants growing well away from roadsides and farm fields, since the felted leaves trap dust and chemical residue. Hang the leaves in small bunches in a dark, well-ventilated space for two weeks until they crumble easily, then store in an airtight glass jar. The yellow flowers, harvested in the second year, are even more medicinally valuable than the leaves and are traditionally infused in olive oil for ear infections.

How do you identify mullein?

Mullein is one of the easiest medicinal plants in North America to identify and almost impossible to confuse with anything dangerous. In the first year, it grows as a low rosette of large soft leaves arranged like a flat star against the ground. The leaves are silver-green, 4 to 12 inches long, and covered in fine hairs that feel exactly like felt or velvet when you touch them. This is the diagnostic feature. No common toxic plant has the same soft felted texture. In the second year, the plant sends up a single tall flowering stalk reaching 6 to 10 feet, covered in small five-petaled yellow flowers blooming a few at a time from June through September. It grows in disturbed soil along highways, railroad tracks, abandoned lots, gravel pits, and field edges. It thrives in poor compacted soil and needs no water. A single mature plant produces over 200,000 seeds, which is why you can drive past a thousand of them on any American back road in summer.

Are there side effects or precautions for mullein?

Mullein is one of the safest medicinal herbs known. No serious adverse events have been reported in modern clinical trials, and it has 2,400 years of continuous traditional use across multiple cultures. The single most important practical precaution is to strain the tea thoroughly through a coffee filter or fine cheesecloth, because the leaf hairs can irritate the throat. Do not harvest from roadsides, parking lots, or farm field edges, since the felted leaves trap heavy metals, road salt, and pesticide residue. Mullein seeds contain rotenone and coumarin and should not be ingested; only the leaves and flowers are used medicinally. Pregnancy and breastfeeding data is limited, so consult a qualified practitioner before use. As with any herbal medicine, mullein does not replace medical care for serious respiratory conditions. If you have asthma, COPD, or active pulmonary infection, work with your doctor and consider mullein as a complementary support, not a replacement for prescribed treatment.