Mrs Grieve's Herbal

It is found widely distributed throughout England, though can scarcely be termed common, occurring only locally, in damp pastures and shady ground. It is probably a true native plant in southern England, but where found farther north may have originally only been an escape from cultivation, as it was cultivated for centuries as a medicinal plant, being a common remedy for sicknesses in the Middle Ages. When present in Scotland, it is considered to have been introduced. Culpepper says:
'It groweth in moist grounds and shadowy places oftener than in the dry and open borders of field and lanes and other waste places, almost in every county in this country’

but it was probably more common in his days, cultivation of it being still general.
It is found wild throughout continental Europe, from Gothland southwards, and extends eastwards in temperate Asia as far as Southern Siberia and North-West India. As a plant of cultivation, it has wandered to North America, where it has become thoroughly naturalized in the eastern United States, being found from Nova Scotia to Northern Carolina, and westward as far as Missouri, growing abundantly in pastures and along roadsides, preferring wet, rocky ground at or near the base of eastern and southern slopes.

 

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 9 - Elecampane

 The root is thick, branching and mucilaginous, and has a warm, bitter taste and a camphoraceous odour with sweet floral (similar to violet) undertones. For medicinal purposes it should be procured from plants not more than two or three years old. Besides inulin, C₁₂H₂₀O₁₀, a body isomeric with starch, the root contains helenin, C₆H₃O, a stearoptene, which may be prepared in white acicular crystals, insoluble in water, but freely soluble in alcohol. When freed from the accompanying inula-camphor by repeated crystallization from alcohol, helenin melts at 110° C. By the ancients the root was employed both as a medicine and as a condiment, and in England it was formerly in great repute as an aromatic tonic and stimulant of the secretory organs

John Parkinson - Theatrum Botanicum

The fresh roots of elecampane preserved with sugar, or made into a syrup or conserve, are very effectual to warm a cold and windy stomack, and the pricking and stitches therein or in the sides caused by the Spleene, and to helpe the cough, shortness of breath, and wheesing in the Lungs.