96 REPORT OF THE HARVARD AFRICAN EXPEDITION 
and goat’s milk, palm leaves and salt, or powder of sycamore leaves or sulphate 
of zine and honey. The dry sycamore powder is also mixed with anything 
sweet, and used for diarrhoea. The sap of the luwikiwiki leaf mixed with oil 
is used for earache. They try to stop excessive bleeding with the boiled luzieze 
plant, which they also use as an anaesthetic. From the gum of the Euphorbia 
they make a salve for wounds and abrasions, and for an emetic they use the sap 
of ndamba. They also use many other gums in the cure of skin diseases. For the 
trial by ordeal they prepare draughts from the calabar bean and mbundu root, 
the tangena nut, the strophanthus creeper, the bark muavi of the erythrophloewm 
and from the white datura flowers. They also extract the venom from dangerous 
snakes and make their poisonous medicines palatable by mixing them with the 
juices of different fruits. 
Among the magic potions, the Bori doctor has a medicine that he makes from 
powdered owls. Another is made of dried monkey flesh. For intestinal troubles, 
some use the chopped hair of the patients. For the same ailment the Butwa 
doctor splits a lizard down the back and places it over the spleen of the patient 
above perforations made in his skin. He paints sloughing ulcers with a feather 
dipped in water mixed with the scrapings of blue stone. Among other tribes, 
the soil of an ant hill is given for internal troubles. The Bundu women apply 
masticated food to the joints for rheumatism and arthritis, while the Nda doctor 
squirts pepper from his mouth into the eyes of a victim of epilepsy, and he also 
uses pepper as a cathartic in treating the same disease. From a crude dummy 
teat dipped in banana wine, the Nkimba men or women suck camwood and chalk 
for Saint Vitus’ Dance, or, for gastric troubles, drink through it water in which 
stones have been boiled. Their doctors chew a pepper corn and spit the juice 
into the ears and mouth for brain diseases and make up smelling salts for head- 
ache and neuralgia by tying into a bundle, the fin of a fish, the head of a snake, 
the foot of a fowl, and the tail of a rat, all considerably decomposed.! 
Among the many other vegetable preparations employed by the natives and 
medicine men of Liberia in the treatment of disease are the following: — De- 
coctions are prepared from the greenish bark of the tree (No. 421) Anthocleista 
nobilis to cure gastritis and from a mixture of the roots of the plant Combretum 
grandiflorum and the orchid Liparis rufina, for use in diarrhoea. The plant 
Jatropha Curcas is used both as a purgative and as an emetic. Some of the 
tribes also use it to cover rice during cooking, probably for its laxative effects. 
Cassia, particularly the species identified by Linder, C. kirkii and C. 
occidentalis, furnishes leaves which contain senna in which chrysophanic and 
cathartic acids are present. Cassia is also employed as a purgative. It is found 
growing in the vicinity of a great many of the towns. 
The epiphytic Dinophora spenneroides is said to be employed in the treatment 
of gonorrhoea. Another epiphytic member of the Piperaceae with fleshy leaves 
which are cooked with rice and administered to the patient, is used by the Vai 
for the treatment of fits. It is not known whether these two plants contain any 
definite active principle. Hzbiscus surratensis, the leaves of which are covered 
1 Butt-Thompson: Loc. cit. 
