PENNY-ROYAL PULEGIUM. * DESCRIPTION. This plant is perennial, warm, pungent, and aromatic: flowers in September. HISTORY. It grows in old pastures, and in the woods on poor uplands. MEDICAL VIRTUES. It is stimulative, antispasmodic, expectorant and emmenagogic: is beneficial in easing spasms, promotes expectoration in the whooping cough, hysterical complaints, and pains in the hips. PREPARATION. Pour a quart of boiling water on an handful of the herb: dose, half a pint once or twice a day and at bed time, for the bringing down of the menses. In hooping coughs, children may take a teaspoonful of the juice sweetened with honey every two hours. This plant rises from three to four feet in height: leaves ovate, and on strong stalks: flowers purple berries dark purple: the seeds inconspi cuous. HISTORY. It grows by the road sides, near old buildings, and in pastures, throughout the United States. MEDICAL VIRTUES. The root, which is large, bulbous, and white, is an emetic, cathartic, and discutient. The berries are stimulative, sudorific, and pectoral. PREPARATION. Infuse one ounce of the coarse powdered root in a pint of Madeira wine for a week, and you will have an excellent emetic wine: dose, two table-spoonsful, which operates mildly, and work it off with camomile tea. Several wonderful cures in chronic rheumatisms have been effected by the following tincture: to one pint and an half of the expressed juice of the berries add half a pint of brandy: dose, from one to two table-spoons ful night and morning, diluted in half a pint of prickly-ash tea. The root roasted and mashed with vinegar, discusses hard glandular tumours, by applying it twice a day. The following is the method for making my famous cancer ointment, which has been purchased of me by a great number of physicians, and always proved effectual: take the fresh leaves and roots of young poke weed, bruise them well in a mortar, and express the juice: to one pound of fresh butter, burnt in a frying-pan till it is of a blackish colour, stir in half a pint of pulverized gun powder, and hold it over the fire until it flashes once or twice : then pour the butter thus burnt into a quart of the poke juice, mix it well, and let in stand on the hot coals in an earthen pot until it is boiled to the consistence of an ointment. This ointment if spread on linen and applyed over the cancer every other day, will kill the roots and bring them all out. Wash the cancer with a decoction of yellow dock root, boiled in four quarts of water down to three ; and drink half a pint of it daily twice a day. After the roots are dead, apply a poultice of bruised yellow dock leaves, and heal the sore with the elder salve. This curious plant is so well known that it needs no further description, than is given you by the engraving. HISTORY. It grows on rocks near king's bridge, in the county of New-York, as well as in other rocky places throughout the United States. MEDICAL VIRTUES. I have found it of great service in the cure of malignant ulcers on the legs, and efficacious in the cure of corns. |