CHAPTER XIV
ROSIN-WEED AGAIN HISTORICAL AND PHARMACOLOGICAL
When we wish to learn anything about American medical literature, we turn to the big Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General. The botanical name of rosin-weed is silphium. In the Index Catalogue, the word rosin-weed does not appear, but, in the first series, under silphium, there are ten references, and thereby hangs a tale.
Ancient Silphium. In ancient Greek and Roman medicine there was a famous gum called silphion (Latin silphium) which, like all popular medicines, was the better for being brought from a far country and for being a little mysterious; for it was brought across the Mediterranean from Cyrene, where it had been originally presented to the inhabitants of that favored place by the gods. Learned botanists have discussed at length what plant produced this gum and have concluded that, like its neighbor in Egypt, the papyrus plant, it has disappeared from the earth. Even in Dioscorides' time the plant was getting scarce and there came a day when in all Cyrene there remained only a single silphium plant, which was piously presented to that worthy representative of the gods, the emperor Nero.
In the year 1817, an Italian, Della Cella, returning from an expedition of the Egyptian Pasha against the neighboring Arab tribes, reported that he had discovered the ancient silphion growing on the site of old Cyrene. He brought back specimens of the plant which were identified as a species of thapsia. Several expeditions brought back more specimens but there was little general interest until Laval, in 1859, saw the commercial possibilities in a revival of this wonder-medicine and put the famous old cure-all on the market as a specific for consumption, under the name of silphium Cyrenaicum, backed by the endorsement of all the ancients from Hippocrates to Pliny. Seldom has even a French or German drug house found so distinguished a company of medical authorities to endorse its wares. Whereat, there began a brisk discussion in the European journals, first, whether the ancient silphion had been found and, secondly, whether, if found, it was worth anything. Both questions being finally decided in the negative, the ancient silphion passes again into the twilight of tradition; all of which entertaining tale may be read at great length in the Dictionnaire Encyclopædique des Sciences Médicales, Paris, 1881, Volume 9.
Now, with one exception, all the references to silphium in the Index Catalogue refer to this silphion controversy and have nothing to do with our American silphium or rosin-weed. The exception is the reference to Dr. Goss, to be related presently.
The American Silphium. On the American prairies from Ohio south and west to Texas, as far north as Wisconsin and south to Florida, there grows abundantly a plant unknown in Europe and better known here to botanists than to physicians. From the gummy juice that exudes from the leaves and stem, Linnæus himself named the genus silphium in memory of the ancient silphion of Cyrene and the plain people called it rosin-weed. There are more than twenty species of rosin-weed or silphium, all probably similar in their medicinal virtues. The species that we have used in hay fever is the silphium laciniatum (Silphium gummiferum, Ell.) This species is known also as the compass-plant or pilot-weed because the large lower leaves present their faces north and south, as we may remember from our boyhood tales of the plains where the trapper never lost his way because he had simply to look down at his feet and there was the compass-plant pointing faithfully to the north.
Rosin-Weed among the Indians. This rosin-weed is not a poisonous plant. Children all over the west gather the resin for chewing-gum as the Indians did before them and horses eat it freely, being thereby protected from the heaves, as the frontier tradition goes. Rosin-weed was valued highly by the Indian. He chewed the gum to make his breath sweet and drank a decoction of the root to make him live forever. The rosin-weed of the Indian is the parallel of the ancient silphion, the opoponax or all-healing juice of southern Europe, the spruce gum and pine tar of rural America and the more valued resins of the East where, in Othello's time, the trees dropped down their medicinal gum; for we find the native gums used all over the world for the same diseases, cough and consumption and urinary distress, always with a dash of mystery and the idea of prolonging life.
Rosin-Weed among the Eclectics. One would have thought that the early American botanic physicians who worked so industriously to introduce American plants and who learned the use of many native plants from the Indians, would have adopted such a popular remedy but I find no mention of it in their books. The learned writer in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales was correct in writing, in 1821, Volume 51, page 312, that there were several varieties of silphium, all growing in America, but that none of them as yet had been used as medicines.
It was reserved for a successor of the old botanic school, an eclectic physician, Dr. H. B. Garrison, to introduce rosin-weed into medical practice as a specific for asthma in an article in the Eclectic Medical Review in 1868. This article was abstracted in the Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal, in the Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery and in Francis Porcher's Medical Botany of the Southern States, second edition, 1869 (not in the first edition of 1863). Dr. Garrison noted also the popular belief that heaves or asthma did not exist in horses on the prairies where this plant grew.