SOME MEDICINAL WILDINGS 



certain shrubs or small trees of the Dogwood 

 family, which has representatives on both sides of 

 the continent. One of these is the well-known 

 Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida, L.), which 

 beautifies spring woodlands with its showy white 

 floral involucres from Canada to Florida and Texas. 

 The bark is tonic, mildly stimulant and anti-inter- 

 mittent, and many physicians have recognized its 

 worth as a remedy in intermittent fevers, inferior 

 only to Peruvian bark. A decoction is made of the 

 dried bark of either the tree itself or the root, the 

 latter being the stronger. (The fresh bark is said 

 to be cathartic.) On the Pacific Coast from British 

 Columbia to Southern California a kindred species is 

 the Western Dogwood (Cornus Nuttallii, Aud.), 

 which resembles in general appearance its eastern 

 cousin. The bark is similarly useful. Townsend, 

 in his journal of the Wyeth expedition to the Pacific 

 Coast in the early days, tells of his curing two 

 Oregon Indian children of fever-and-ague with this 

 Dogwood, his supply of quinine being exhausted. 

 He boiled the fresh bark in water and administered 

 about a scruple a day. In three days his little 

 patients were well. As he worked over the decoc- 

 tion, the Indians crowded about him curiously; and 

 "I took pains, " he writes, "to explain the whole 



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