98 
ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS. 
upon which your lot is cast, requires of you elevated and 
manly principles; that you can not sustain the station which 
rightfully belongs to a liberal and learned profession, as ours 
is becoming, without devoting yourselves to the pursuits of 
learning no less than to those of business; and that next to the 
approving smiles of a good conscience, the search after truth 
and the delights of science and literature are the best solace 
of a mind chafed with the anxieties of business and oppressed 
by the unavoidable calamities of life. 
ART. X VIII.— ON LOBELIA INFLATA. By William Procter, Jr. 
f Jin Inaugural Essay. J 
Among the many medicinal agents of the vegetable king- 
dom, indigenous to this country, perhaps few have higher 
claims to the consideration of the physician, than the Lobelia 
inflata. 
Possessed of powerful medical qualities, and capable of 
making the most decided impressions upon the human sys- 
tem, we have every reason to believe that in time, under the 
cognizance of the skilful practitioner, it will be numbered 
among our most valuable remedies. 
It was long in the hands of empirics before its introduction 
into regular practice. The first notice we havfe of it, as a re- 
medial agent, is in the Massachusetts Reports, for the year 
1807 or 8, where an account of its action is detailed in the 
trial of Samuel Thomson, an empiric, for the alleged murder 
of an inhabitant of Beverly, by the too free use of this plant. 
It has been said that it belonged to the materia medica of 
the Aborigines of this country, but as far as we have been 
able to learn, the uses to which they applied it have not been 
ascertained. 
Its medical history is intimately connected with the rise 
