Pliny and Horace
There's too much Pliny and Horace in here, and too little information (that Horace disliked garlic isn't terribly important, for example). I suspect some transcription or scanning errors, as well. In particular, what is "Theophrastus, Characters, l~.eunbcuuoviac"?
- Theophrastus was a Greek writer... "Characters" seems to be the title of one of his works, in which he describes such use of garlic. "l~.eunbcuuoviac" appears to be a mis-OCR'd Greek word. (Yes, I know, I'm helpful.) A google search for theophrastus and garlic turns up a number of hits mentioning that Theophrastus once mentioned garlic in this context, which have a nasty tendency not to turn up a Greek word that looks enough like the OCR'd garbage for me to feel confident about it (especially since I don't know Greek). Does anyone have a dead-tree 90-year old Britannica lying around to check? Brion VIBBER
- I´m Greek. I don´t know what Theofrastus may have written about garlic but my contribution to this page is this: what is mentioned above means nothing in Gree(not even transliterated to latin characters). Garlik in Greek is called skordo (σκόρδο). And it is used quite allot in Greece..IT is delicious although you wouldn^t want to go looking for a date after eating tzatziki. (the world known Greek appetizer consisting of yogurt, cucumber and garlic...)yummie..
Has lately
The 1911 encyclopedia has exactly the sort of "has lately" problem we're trying to avoid here, made worse by its lately being 90-100 years ago. More rewriting to follow. Vicki Rosenzweig
Safety
I miss information regarding wether garlic is posinous in any form. I was eating food with garlic sqeezed from garlic with little green "shots" on them. I was thinking if those might be dangerous to eat so I thought I would find out on wikipedia, but could not find that info.
- The shoots are certainly to eat, and are sometimes used as a vegetable in their own right. More generally, I have several books that confidently claim that no Allium is poisonous in any part. — Pekinensis 02:15, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Medicinal effects
Other medicinal effects are being debated but I think that garlic has been shown to reduce arteriosclerosis. See: http://www.kroger.com/hn/Herb/Garlic.htm (numerous references) and "The antiatherosclerotic effect of Allium sativum." Atherosclerosis. 2000 Jun;150(2):437-8. Dwheaton
I'm not sure this article is entirely correct-- the medicinal effects of allicin, garlic's active ingredient, have been proven in a large number of studies.
See this study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15910499&query_hl=8 and then do a search for "allicin" and you will find MANY more. I'm too lazy to dig through it all and correct this article, but maybe someone's that bored.