Everyone knows something of the benefits earthworms create for us. But have you heard of their medical uses, including ingesting them? More of that later. The French newspaper Le Monde has an article on the earthworm, "The farmers best friend". The writer gives prominence to the early work of Gilbert White, whose Natural History of Selborne has been often quoted here, and goes over, for a start, the ground covered by White's words. "Earthworms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of Nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm. For to say nothing of the half the birds, and some quadrupeds which are almost entirely supported by them, worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them, by boring, perforating and loosening the soil .. . and most of all by throwing up such infinite numbers of lumps of earth called wormcasts, which, being their excrement, is a fine manure for grain and grass. .. ."
The writer in Le Monde, Catherine Vincent, gives us more on this and also corrects a common misconception: if you cut a worm in half, you are not creating two worms. The front part alone survives. Only in deserts and in Polar regions does the earthworm not exist. And they reproduce themselves well. She reckons that worms on a dungheap are the most prolific - 350 little ones per year.
There are, of course, many different species of them. In our temperate region she estimates that worms "ingest and transform no less than 300 tonnes of earth per hectare per year". Now to eating worms, or rather to medical uses of worms or worm extract. Back to Pliny and to medieval Arabia and Persia (Iran). Also to the Indians of North America.
Chopped up or pulverised, they were said to have sedative properties and were used applied to wounds and sores, also for stomach troubles and gout. At the beginning of the 20th century a substance was isolated in worms which brought down fevers. More recently, she writes, one which dilated the bronchial tubes. The article ends: "Having treated them for almost 2,000 years with the deepest contempt, man has come to see them, in the words of Aristotle as `the earth's intestines'."