PHARMACOPCIAL VEGETABLE DRUGS. 
days, and the waiter asked a Kentuckian at my side who ordered tea, 
“what kind of tea” he wanted. “Store tea,” he answered, “I kin git 
pleanty of sassafras at home.” 
It is not customary for sassafras drinkers to keep the root-bark 
separated from the root, the recently dug roots being shaved as the bark 
was used. Kentuckians claim that there are two varieties of sassafras, 
the red sassafras and the white, distinguished only by the bark. The 
white sassafras is not so aromatic and is bitter to the taste, and they 
use only the red bark. 
In addition to the wood, root and bark, mucilage of the pith is 
employed in domestic medicine to bathe inflamed eyes. I find a com- 
plete description of the domestic uses of sassafras in Rafinesque’s 
Medical Flora, 1830, which for various reasons I[ feel called upon to 
reproduce as an ending to this record of sassafras. 
Found from Canada to Mexico and Brazil. Roots, bark, leaves, flowers, 
fragrant and spicy. Flavor and smell peculiar, similar to fennel, sweetish sub- 
acrid, residing in a volatile oil heavier than water. The sassafrine, a peculiar 
mucus unalterable by alcohol, found chiefly in the twigs and pith, thickens 
water, very mild and lubricating, very useful in opthalmia, dysentery, gravel, 
catarrh, etc. Wood yellow, hard, durable, soon loses the smell; the roots chiefly 
exported for use as stimulant, antispasmodic, sudorific, and depurative; the oil 
now often substituted ; both useful in rheumatism, cutaneous diseases, secondary 
syphilis, typhus fevers, etc. Once used in dropsy. The Indians use a strong 
decoction to purge and clean the body in the spring; we use instead the tea of 
the blossoms for a vernal purification of the blood. The powder of the leaves 
used to make glutinous gombos. Leaves and buds used to flavor some beers and 
spirits. Also deemed vulnerary and resolvent chewed and applied, or mena- 
gogue and corroborant for women in tea; useful in scurvy, cachexy, flatulence, 
etc. Bowls and cups made of the wood, when fresh, it drives bugs and moths. 
The bark dyes wood of a fine orange color called “shikih” by Missouri tribes, 
and smoked like tobacco. 
SCAMMONIUM 
The dried juice of scammony (Convolvulus scammonia) has 
been used in domestic medicine from ancient times. Theophrastus 
(633), 300 B. C., mentions it, as well as did Dioscorides (194), Pliny 
(514), Celsus (136), and Rufus of Ephesus (561a), a city in whose 
neighborhood scammony abounded, as is yet the case near its ruins. 
The early Arabians were acquainted with the plant, and in the tenth 
and eleventh centuries it was used in Britain, being commended to 
Alfred the Great by Helias, Patriarch of Jerusalem. Botanists of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Brunfels (107), Gesner (264). 
and others, described the plant as well as the drug obtained therefrom, 
the latter being well described by Russell (566), an English physician 
of Aleppo, in 1752. 
Scammony is obtained from Asia Minor, near Smyrna, which is 
its principal port of export. The resin of scammony, in the form of 
a dried juice, was gathered by means of sea shells, within which the 
juice collected and dried, a method of obtaining it still practiced in 
Asia Minor, Mr, Clark, of Sochia, near Smyrna, obtained the resin 
as an alcoholic extract from the dried root, a method of production 
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