SCAMMONIUM 297 



spirits. Also deemed vulnerary and resolvent chewed 

 and applied, or menagogue 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 (Scammony) 

 Official in all editions of the U. S. P., from 1820 to 1910. 



The dried juice of scammony (Convolvulus Scam- 

 monia) has been used in domestic medicine from an- 

 cient 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 scammony, and it was used in Britain in the 10th 

 and llth centuries, being commended to Alfred the 

 Great by Helias, Patriarch of Jerusalem. Botanists of 

 the 16th and 17th centuries, as Brunfels (107), Gesner 

 (264), and others, described the plant, as well as the 

 drug obtained therefrom, the latter being well de- 

 scribed 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 was 

 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 now in use, but which probably 



