The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1902-06-14
THE EFFICACY OF HERBS.

OcVeIal ldI Se WHOLESALE drug houses
down town, says the New York /our-
nal, find it worth while to keep in
stock large assortment of herbs for
medical use, and at least one such
house, more than fifty years in exis-
tence, deals in such articles alone.
These houses supply druggists all
over the East with the raw materials
of which many standard medicines are
made, and with the traditional herbs,
roots and barks of our grandmothers.
The trade in these things, even in
this city is large, and they are sold
wherever household remedies still
have place of honor.
One of these wholesale houses is
sues catalogue that is in some sort
rough guide to the art and mystery
of herb doctoring. 1t is these rene
dies that are compounded by the So
called botanic druggists, or "botan-
ists," as they are sometimes styled.
Many of these remedies are we'll rec
ognized medicines, unhesitatingly
prescribed by physicians of scientific
education, and some such physicians
still cling to inherited formulas and
traditional herbs.
Many of the botanical remedies
come straight down from the days
when monks, old women and all sorts
of housing folks, good and bad, made
it their business to study the proper
ties of roots and herbs. Some must
have been borrowed from the Indian
medicine men, and doubtless Roger
Chillingworth gathered in the Puri-
tan graveyards many of the ''simples"
that now figure in the catalogues of
the botanic druggists. Some of the
best known of these herbs are at least
as old as Galen, and scores of them
have run for centuries through his
tory and literature. The wholesale
botanic druggists are redolent of their
stock in trade.
Nearly 500 roots, herbs, seeds,
flowers and barks are kept in stock
by the largest botanic druggists, and
new remedies are still from time to
time added to the lists. The plants
thus kept are not only those known
to the pharmacopoeia as containing
theactive principles of standard drugs,
but nearly every familiar plant, wild
or cultivated. Not only the dande-
lion, may apple. boneset and pepsise-
way of our grondmothers and the
licorice root, slippery elm and GIN
seng of the orthodox materia medica
must be kept on hand, but as we'll
hundreds of others known to those
deeply read in the science of simples.
Favorite flowers and famous plants
takes roles strangely unfamiliar to
those unlearned in herbs and drugs.
The bark of the tulip tree, according
to the catalogue, cures Mysteries and
dyspepsia. Thistle trees Strength
ems the system and excites persira-
tion." Water lilies of one sort or
another are good for pectoral COM
plants and scrofula. Watermelon
seed is excellent for dropsy," doubt
less upon the homeopathic principle.
The white willow is a substitute for
Peruvian bark. The wild sunhower
is set down as Invaluable in bilious
colic," and like complaints. Sweet
clover is for swellings.
The strawberry furnished in its
leaves remedy for sore throat, and
in its wandering stem cure for jaun-
dice and fevers. Seven kinds of snake
root furnish remedies for rheumatism,
dropsy, hysteria, collie, backache,
measles, scrofula, hives, Group, fevers
and some complaints of the stomach.
Many plants are enumerated as
having the properties of quinine in
greater or less degree. There are
several substitutes for opium, and
like doubles for other familiar drugs.
The number Of plants that cure rheu-