200 FLORA HOMOEOPATHIC A.. 



considers this change to be effected by frost" (Pereira, op. cit., 

 p. 1361). 



Physiological Effects. — Taraxacum has produced in over- 

 doses, particularly on weak digestive organs, dyspepsia, flatu- 

 lency, pain, and diarrhoea. Its diuretic effects have been much 

 overstated. 



Medical Uses (Homoeopathic). — Hahnemann's observations: 

 " The application of this plant, like many others, has been 

 greatly abused, and it is constantly employed, so to speak, as a 

 general remedy. In fact, in all the diseases, which, in spite of 

 their pretension to universal sagacity, those who called them- 

 selves practitioners did not clearly see the means of treating, as 

 well as in all those to which no name given by pathologists 

 applied, theory supposed a thickening of humours and obstruc- 

 tions of the capillary tubes, which no one perceived, in order to 

 justify themselves, according to these fantastic suppositions, in 

 prescribing the favourite Taraxacum, regarded from its milky 

 juice as likely to act as a soap ; because soaps having the power 

 of dissolving a great number of substances in the chemist's jar, 

 the Taraxacum was supposed, in like manner, to dissolve in the 

 living body the viscous humours and obstructions which they 

 thought proper to suppose existing in the patient. 



" But if they had ever thought of studying the simple quali- 

 ties of the Taraxacum, i. e., the changes which it causes in the 

 physical and moral state of the human frame, the particular 

 morbid conditions which it is especially apt to excite, and, if 

 afterwards applying this plant therapeutically, that is, employ- 

 ing it alone in some morbid cases, they had found it efficacious 

 in producing a prompt and lasting cure, it would have been 

 easy to convince themselves, by comparing its symptoms with 

 those of the disease, that it cures only by the analogy existing 

 between these two orders of symptoms, and that, consequently, 

 it could never exercise a curative power in cases where such 

 analogy is not found. 



" If anything were capable of converting ordinary practi- 



