Medical Virtues.—It is a powerful febrifuge, and I have found it a sure and quick medicine in exciting perspiration, without increasing the heat of the body. The root is effectual in all remittent, typhus, and nervous fevers, and will relieve the patient of all pains caused by colds.
Preparation.—After prescribing a mild puke of the American ipecacuanha, and the physic has done working, I give one or two ounces of the root, to be put into two quarts of rain water, and boiled down to one, and giving the patient, in bed, a teacupful of the strained liquor every hour, which causes a plentiful perspiration, and generally stops the fever in a few hours. The night-hectic fever, in a consumptive patient, I have relieved by the above treatment. It is an excellent medicine in pleurisy, and a sure remedy in erysipelatose fever.
Pulverize the root, sift the powder through a fine hair sieve, and put it in bottles, well stopped from the air. A teaspoonful of this powder may be taken every two hours, in a teacupful of black snakeroot tea, in order to raise a speedy diaphoresis, or perspiration, in pleurisies and fever, when they are violent.
BLACK ALDER
Rises to the height of a small tree, and is much branched towards the top; the young shoots are full of pith—the old ones empty; the leaves are pinnated, consisting of two or three pair, with an odd one at the end; flowers, sweet smelling, white, and produced on large, flat umbels, or clusters. The fruit is a round, succulent berry, of a blackish purple color, and contains three seeds.
History.—This tree grows in hedges and clumps, along the borders of meadows or flats, in every part of the United States; flowers in July, and the berries are ripe in September.
Medical Virtues.—An infusion, in wine, of the inner bark of the trunk, or the expressed juice of the berries, in a dose of an ounce, will purge moderately, and, taken in small doses,—say a teaspoonful every hour,—proves an efficacious diabetruent, capable of promoting and assisting all the fluid secretions. The following is a good medicine in families, for the cure of recent colds and coughs:—
Take of the juice of elderberries, strained, ten pounds, and add three pounds of loaf sugar; evaporate in a bake pan, over a slow fire, into the consistence of thick honey. A tablespoonful or two may be taken at bed time; and two teaspoonsful, for children, in coughs and costiveness, will prove effectual.
In erysipelatosed fever, a teacupful of the infusion of dry flowers, (made by pouring a quart of boiling water on a handful of the flowers,) may be taken every hour, and the parts wet with the following wash:—Boil four ounces of beech drops, in four quarts of rain water, down to one half; strain the decoction, and add to it a teaspoonful of sugar of lead. The face and arms may be wet with a linen rag, dipped in this lotion, four or five times a day, which never fails to cure, after necessary evacuations.
The above is also very good for children having the whooping cough, by taking a teaspoonful or two every hour.