478 
Oil  of  Sesamum. 
f  Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
\    October,  1910. 
Any  of  you  further  interested  in  the  history  of  sesamum  I 
would  recommend  to  look  up  the  masterwork  of  the  German 
pharmaceutical  historian,  Dr.  Hermann  Schelenz,  "  Geschichte  der 
Pharmazie." 
OLEUM  SESAMI  SHOULD  BE  ADMITTED  INTO  THE  U.S. P.  IX. 
I  can,  however,  not  agree  with  the  decision  of  the  old  Revision 
Committee  that  sesame  oil  is  antiquated  and  no  longer  in  use.  It 
has  been  official  right  along  in  a  number  of  pharmacopoeias,  it 
has  been  used  officially  and  unofficially  in  the  preparations  of  a 
large  number  of  galenicals  and  it  has  been  admitted  to  all  the  recent 
pharmacopoeias.  As  I  said  before  the  British  Pharmacopoeia 
sanctions  the  use  of  oil  of  sesamum  in  place  of  olive  oil  in  the  British 
Colonies.  Inasmuch  as  the  revisers  of  the  foreign  pharmacopoeias 
are  convinced  of  the  value  of  this  oil  and  in  view  of  the  many 
experiments,  for  a  period  of  several  years,  which  I  and  other 
pharmacists  have  made  with  oil  of  sesamum  in  various  galenical 
preparations,  I  sincerely  hope  that  the  present  Revision  Committee 
will  consider  the  admission  of  this  oil  into  the  new  U.S. P.  and  its 
use  in  several  galenicals. 
EXPERIMENTS  WITH  OLEUM  SESAMI. 
The  use  of  sesame  oil  by  the  writer  dates  back  about  20  years, 
when  he  prepared  a  hair  oil  or  macassar  oil,  colored  red  with 
alkanet  and  suitably  perfumed,  which  in  those  days  had  a  very  large 
sale,  undoubtedly  due  to  the  fact  that  it  was  less  oily,  less  sticky 
and  gummy,  and  more  readily  absorbed  and  penetrating  than  others. 
Oil  of  sesamum  has  been  used  for  anointing  in  ancient  times  and  is 
mentioned  as  such  in  the  Bible  and  is  described  for  this  and  other 
uses  by  Dioscorides,  that  most  important  author,  whose  works 
on  pharmacology  and  the  entire  materia  medica  were  authoritative 
down  to  the  sixteenth  century.  Xenophon,  the  last  of  the 
three  great  Greek  historians,  writes  in  his  Anabasis  or  Expeditio 
Cyri  (371  B.C.),  an  account  of  "  the  retreat  of  the  ten  thousand,''  a 
part  of  the  army  of  Cyrus,  after  the  unfortunate  battle  of  Kunara, 
that  by  the  application  of  sesame  oil  they  prevented  their  hands  and 
feet  from  becoming  frostbitten. 
The  following  are  a  few  of  the  external  preparations  >  with 
