AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHARMACY, 
OCTOBER. 1851. 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE SASSY BARK OF WESTERN AFRICA 
AND ON THE TREE PRODUCING IT. 
Br "William Procter. Jr. 
Various travellers, from the celebrated Mungo Park to the more 
recent explorers of Western and Central Africa, have alluded in their 
narratives to the use of a poisonous bark as an ordeal to which 
persons suspected of witch-craft, secret murder, and other crimes in 
the code of those countries, are subjected, as a test of their inno- 
cence or guilt. In Congo, it is known as the " ordeal bark," and 
in Ashantee and the neighboring settlements of Liberia, as "doom 
bark," and the process of its administration as "taking doom." 
It is also said to be resorted to as a means of gratifying private 
revenge, an application to which its chemical nature readily ad- 
mits, and its use, in the opinion of the missionaries, is a great 
moral evil worthy the attention of the philanthropic. 
Moses Sheppard, Esq., of Baltimore — a gentleman whose in- 
terest in the welfare of the African race has, for many years past, 
connected him, as a patron, with the Colonization of Western 
Africa, at Liberia — several years since received from Dr. Samuel 
F. McGill, of Cape Palmas, a few pounds of sassy bark, a portion 
of which was given to Mr. Charles A. Santos, now of Norfolk, 
Va., who published an account of its physical, and some of its 
chemical properties, in this Journal, vol. xxi, p. 97.* 
More recently, Mr. Sheppard placed in my hands about two 
pounds of the bark for examination, but feeling a reluctance to 
devote time and labor to the investigation of a product, the bota- 
nical source of which was unknown, that gentleman kindly offered 
* Mr. Santos calls it saucy bark. Sassy is the term used by Dr. McGill. 
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