GELSEMIUM 151 



cotic, their effluvia may cause stupor, tincture of the 

 root is used for rheumatism in frictions," a statement 

 taken almost literally from Elliott's (227) Botany of 

 South Carolina and Georgia, 1821. The medical record, 

 (King) (356), had its origin through the mistake of a 

 servant of a Southern planter who was afflicted with 

 fever. This servant, by error, gave his master a de- 

 coction of gelsemium root instead of the garden plant 

 intended. Immediate loss of muscular power and 

 great depression followed, all control of the limbs was 

 lost, the eyelids drooped and could not be voluntarily 

 opened. Death seemed imminent. But the effects 

 finally wore away and the man recovered, free from 

 fever, which did not recur. An observing physician 

 took this experience as a text, and prepared from gel- 

 semium a remedy that he called the ' 'Electrical febri- 

 fuge," which attained some popularity. Finally the 

 name of the drug concerned was given to the profession. 

 This statement is found in the first edition of King's 

 American Eclectic Dispensatory, 1852, which work 

 actually presented gelsemium to the world of medicine, 

 although the plant had a recorded position much 

 earlier. King's article on gelsemium was reproduced 

 in substance by the United States Dispensatory, 1854, 

 none of the preceding nine editions of that work having 

 mentioned the drug. But the fact is, that Porcher, 1 



1 Francis Peyre Porcher was born December 14, 1824, St. John's, Berkeley Co., S. C., 

 being the descendant of a French Huguenot family. In 1847 he graduated from the South 

 Carolina State Medical Coljege, Charleston, where he afterward became a professor of 

 Clinical Medicine and Materia Medica. For many years he was editor of the Charleston 

 Medical Journal and Review, was corresponding member of the Academy of Natural Sci- 

 ences, and Fellow of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia. He was President of the S. C. 

 Medical Association, and during the Civil War was Surgeon in Charge of the Confederate 

 Hospitals, Norfolk and Petersburg, Va. In 1 849 he contributed a " Report on the Indigenous 

 Medicinal Plants of South Carolina," Am. Med. Assoc., 176 pp., and in 1854 wrote for the 

 Am. Med. Assoc. a paper on "The Medicinal and Toxicological Properties of the Crypto- 

 " 



gamic Plants of the U. S.," 126 pp. In 1863 he wrote his (now rare) monumental productio 

 in behalf of the Confederacy, "Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests," by dire 

 tion of the Surgeon General of the C. S. A. Dr. Porcher died in Charleston, S. C., Novem- 



