Menstrual blood

Its “startling properties” included “the ability to make a dog mad should he taste it, kill whole fields of crops, or to drive bees from their hives. It could also blunt knives, make iron go rusty, dull a mirror, and had the power to make an unwitting suitor fall in love if some of the woman’s powdered blood was slipped into his drink.” But it did have a beneficial property, whereby “it is said that the root of Peony being given with Castor, and smeared over with a menstruous cloth, cureth the falling sickness” (Evans & Read, 46).