Medicinal properties.—The American medical journals record the successful administration of gelsemium in a great number and variety of diseases, including intermittent, remittent, typhoid, and yellow
fevers, the irritative fevers of childhood, inflammation of the lungs and pleura, dysentery, rheumatism, and other inflammatory affections, neuralgia, obstinate menstruation, delirium tremens, morbid wakefulness, St. Vitus’ dance, hysteria, epilepsy, spasmodic stricture of the urethra, and gonorrhœa. Dr Hurd, an American physician, reports very favorably of the drug as a cardiac sedative, and considers it more efficient than any other remedy in the palpitation and the difficult breathing that accompany heart disease; and Dr Hill, of Maine, finds it when combined with bromide of potassium useful in irritable bladder.
Its principal use, however, in American medical practice has been as a febrifuge. In periodic fevers it has been employed with great advantage, as well as in cases of intermittent fever, which having failed to yield to quinine alone, succumbed, when this latter medicine was combined with gelsemium.
In England gelsemium has been successfully employed for the relief of facial neuralgia, or of the pain caused in the face and jaws by decayed teeth; as well as in obscure nervous affections and severe headaches. It is given principally in the form of tincture; but sometimes in powder in doses of from one to two grains.
The therapeutic action of gelsemium is believed to be due to the sedative effect it exercises on the nervous and arterial systems—hence its power in controlling the nervous irritability so prevalent during fever. In moderate doses it causes a sensation of agreeable langour, accompanied with muscular relaxation; in larger doses, dizziness, dilated pupil, double vision, general muscular debility and prostration; these symptoms being accompanied by a diminution in the force and frequency of the pulse as well as in the respiration. At the same time the patient becomes insensible to pain; but is free from stupor and delirium. These symptoms are said to pass off, after a time, and to be attended with no unpleasant results.
The ‘Lancet’ as well as many of the American medical journals record several cases of poisoning arising from giving an overdose of this drug. The symptoms are a great prostration of nervous energy, accompanied by paralysis of sensation and motion. When death occurs it is probably owing to syncope. The antidotes are, first, an emetic, and after this has acted, stimulants, such as carbonate of ammonia with brandy, or aromatic spirits of ammonia. In cases accompanied with insensibility, recourse should be had to electricity.
Kollock, in the ‘American Journal of Pharmacy’ for 1855, states that he found the root on analysis to yield volatile oil, dry acrid resin, fatty resin, fixed oil, gallic acid, starch, pectic acid, albumen, extractive matter, lignin, gum, a yellow colouring matter, mineral matter (chiefly salts of potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron and silica), and an alkaloid, to which the
name gelseminine or gelsemia has been given. Kollock also states that the leaves and flowers contain the same ingredients as the root, although in much smaller quantities.
Eberle, in the ‘American Journal of Pharmacy’ for 1864, says he failed to obtain gelseminine from the root. In a paper contributed to the ‘American Journal of Pharmacy,’ for January, 1870, by Dr Wormley, the author stated that he said he not only succeeded in obtaining pure gelseminine from the root, but also a peculiar acid which he calls gelseminic, or gelsemic[331] acid; which he regards as existing in combination with the gelsemia, forming the gelsemate of gelsemia.