OK lazybee, hold onto your hair and we'll look into this further. Imagine a time many hundreds of years ago, when people didn't take a shower every day, or wash their clothes often. Transport was by horse ie slow and with plenty of manure around. There was no such thing as Health & Safety. Most people worked with their hands in a mucky environment and the wars were violent, muddy and fought at close quarters. Injuries were frequent and help was not usually available. Many injuries were immediately fatal but others, which appeared to be survivable turned out not to be, with the injured person dying after a few days. We know now that the most dangerous type of fracture is Compound, which means that both the bone and the skin have been broken, allowing dirt, and thus infection, from the environment to get to the inside of the bone. The inside of the bones is where your blood is made, so infection there is going to spread rapidly throughout your body and is difficult to get rid of. Now we know these people were dying of sepicaemia. Even today a compound fracture is a dangerous situation requiring emergency surgery to clean and close the wound, and requires large doses of modern antibiotics. Way back then, without rapid response teams, air ambulances, skilled surgeons, a wide variety of antibiotics, external fixation, skilled wound care and so on and so on, those caring for the injured still had to give it a go, by using what they had to hand. And guess what? They had comfrey, amongst other things and over the years it was found that the mucilaginosity (
yeah I stretched it a bit) and other properties of comfrey aided healing of open/compound fractures, especially if they cleaned it out with wine ie alcohol, before covering it. So from no-one surviving a compound fracture, suddenly some did, which has got to be an improvement. So comfrey earned its name of Knit-bone.
Of course you won't find it in a hospital pharmacy nowadays when we have so many antibiotics and powerful dressings. But one thing you will find is dressings made of seaweed, which are perfect for healing discharging wounds which some of the more hi-tec stuff won't touch. Seaweed is mucilaginous too