Cur moriatur homo cui salvia crescit in horto? Why should a man die who has sage growing in his garden? The line belongs to a medieval Latin health poem, the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, associated with the physicians of Salerno in southern Italy. They meant it seriously. A gray-green shrub by the kitchen door, they believed, could hold death at the gate. And in the very next line of the poem, in the same breath, they took it back: against the power of death, no such herb grows in any garden.

That tension has followed sage for eight centuries. It is the herb of wisdom, the holy herb, the plant that saves. It is also just a plant, and the monks who loved it knew as much. Here is what makes the story worth telling again. The name is an accident. Sage the herb and sage the wise elder come from two entirely unrelated Latin roots, and the resemblance in English is a coincidence of sound. Yet when researchers finally put Salvia officinalis into a randomized trial, they found something in it that acts, quietly and measurably, on human memory. The coincidence turned out to be right anyway. And on the other side of the world, China had a sage of its own, and asked it for something completely different.

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