Oil of Roses

No man can say, no man remember, how many uses there are for Oil of Roses as a cure for mankind’s ailments. Walahfrid Strabo (808 – 849)

These words appear as the first epigraph in the novel An Ròs a Leigheas (The Healing Rose).

When the German monk Walahfrid Strabo wrote his Latin poem Hortulus (The Little Garden), the rose had been used as a medicine for several centuries. Perhaps he knew of the manuscripts of the Roman Pliny the Elder (23 – 79 AD) in which he recommended rose petals either powdered or dried as medicine for many kinds of illness.

It is remarkable that Walahfrid, writing in the ninth century, mentions oil of roses rather than the petals. Distillation was only at an early stage at the time – it was as a result of the perfume industry in Persia in the following centuries that the process was developed.

In the 14th century, Lanfranc – an Italian surgeon who became famous in Paris – described the oil as a healing balm in surgical work. He used it on casualties with sword wounds. And the great French surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510 – 1590) applied oil of roses mixed with egg yolk to wounds caused by muskets and other firearms. 

It was believed that oil of roses was valuable as an astringent – it encouraged contraction of wounded tissue and a reduction in the loss of blood and serum.

Physicians are still interested in oil of roses, particularly in the Middle East – some consider it to be effective in relieving pain. Research is in progress to see if oil of roses might be beneficial to people suffering from dementia.

Today, roses are harvested as a crop in Turkey and Bulgaria - four thousand kg of roses are needed to produce one kg of rose oil. It is an important industry: in 2015, for example, a kg of Turkish rose oil cost € 9000 and Turkey earned approximately € 8 million from its export.