CHAPTER XIV

_ROSIN-WEED AGAIN HISTORICAL AND PHARMACOLOGICAL_

When we wish to learn anything about American medical literature, we turn to the big Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General. The botanical name of rosin-weed is _silphium_. In the Index Catalogue, the word _rosin-weed_ does not appear, but, in the first series, under _silphium_, there are ten references, and thereby hangs a tale.

=Ancient Silphium.= In ancient Greek and Roman medicine there was a famous gum called _silphion_ (Latin _silphium_) which, like all popular medicines, was the better for being brought from a far country and for being a little mysterious; for it was brought across the Mediterranean from Cyrene, where it had been originally presented to the inhabitants of that favored place by the gods. Learned botanists have discussed at length what plant produced this gum and have concluded that, like its neighbor in Egypt, the papyrus plant, it has disappeared from the earth. Even in Dioscorides' time the plant was getting scarce and there came a day when in all Cyrene there remained only a single silphium plant, which was piously presented to that worthy representative of the gods, the emperor Nero.

In the year 1817, an Italian, Della Cella, returning from an expedition of the Egyptian Pasha against the neighboring Arab tribes, reported that he had discovered the ancient silphion growing on the site of old Cyrene. He brought back specimens of the plant which were identified as a species of thapsia. Several expeditions brought back more specimens but there was little general interest until Laval, in 1859, saw the commercial possibilities in a revival of this wonder-medicine and put the famous old cure-all on the market as a specific for consumption, under the name of _silphium Cyrenaicum_, backed by the endorsement of all the ancients from Hippocrates to Pliny. Seldom has even a French or German drug house found so distinguished a company of medical authorities to endorse its wares. Whereat, there began a brisk discussion in the European journals, first, whether the ancient silphion had been found and, secondly, whether, if found, it was worth anything. Both questions being finally decided in the negative, the ancient silphion passes again into the twilight of tradition; all of which entertaining tale may be read at great length in the _Dictionnaire Encyclopædique des Sciences Médicales_, Paris, 1881, Volume 9.

Now, with one exception, all the references to _silphium_ in the Index Catalogue refer to this _silphion_ controversy and have nothing to do with our American _silphium_ or _rosin-weed_. The exception is the reference to Dr. Goss, to be related presently.

=The American Silphium.= On the American prairies from Ohio south and west to Texas, as far north as Wisconsin and south to Florida, there grows abundantly a plant unknown in Europe and better known here to botanists than to physicians. From the gummy juice that exudes from the leaves and stem, Linnæus himself named the genus _silphium_ in memory of the ancient silphion of Cyrene and the plain people called it _rosin-weed_. There are more than twenty species of rosin-weed or silphium, all probably similar in their medicinal virtues. The species that we have used in hay fever is the _silphium laciniatum (Silphium gummiferum, Ell.)_ This species is known also as the compass-plant or pilot-weed because the large lower leaves present their faces north and south, as we may remember from our boyhood tales of the plains where the trapper never lost his way because he had simply to look down at his feet and there was the compass-plant pointing faithfully to the north.

=Rosin-Weed among the Indians.= This rosin-weed is not a poisonous plant. Children all over the west gather the resin for chewing-gum as the Indians did before them and horses eat it freely, being thereby protected from the heaves, as the frontier tradition goes. Rosin-weed was valued highly by the Indian. He chewed the gum to make his breath sweet and drank a decoction of the root to make him live forever. The rosin-weed of the Indian is the parallel of the ancient silphion, the opoponax or _all-healing juice_ of southern Europe, the spruce gum and pine tar of rural America and the more valued resins of the East where, in Othello's time, the trees dropped down their medicinal gum; for we find the native gums used all over the world for the same diseases, cough and consumption and urinary distress, always with a dash of mystery and the idea of prolonging life.

=Rosin-Weed among the Eclectics.= One would have thought that the early American botanic physicians who worked so industriously to introduce American plants and who learned the use of many native plants from the Indians, would have adopted such a popular remedy but I find no mention of it in their books. The learned writer in the _Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales_ was correct in writing, in 1821, Volume 51, page 312, that there were several varieties of silphium, all growing in America, but that none of them as yet had been used as medicines.

It was reserved for a successor of the old botanic school, an eclectic physician, Dr. H. B. Garrison, to introduce rosin-weed into medical practice as a specific for asthma in an article in the _Eclectic Medical Review_ in 1868. This article was abstracted in the _Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal_, in the _Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery_ and in Francis Porcher's _Medical Botany of the Southern States_, second edition, 1869 (not in the first edition of 1863). Dr. Garrison noted also the popular belief that heaves or asthma did not exist in horses on the prairies where this plant grew.

For a few years, rosin-weed became popular and was widely commented on in the eclectic journals; but it soon dropped out of sight and is not to be found in any eclectic text books to-day.

ROSIN-WEED AMONG THE HOMOEOPATHS. Rosin-weed comes into the homoeopathic school through "the indefatigable Dr. Hale," as Richard Hughes calls him. The homoeopathic school owes much to Dr. E. M. Hale, who enriched our materia medica with many American plants, most of them drawn from the eclectic school and, be it noted, Dr. Hale gives full credit to that school from which the new medicines came. Dr. Hale did masterly work in proving the new remedies and verifying the observations of the eclectic physicians and published his _Characteristics of New Remedies_ in 1864. In 1868, Dr. Garrison published his paper on the use of rosin-weed in asthma and Dr. Hale, in his third edition of 1873, included rosin-weed under the name _silphium laciniatum_, as follows:

SILPHIUM LACINIATUM _ROSIN-WEED_

Syn. (page 544) Compass-plant, Polar-plant, Rosin-weed.

Analogues, Cubeba, Copaiva, Terebinthina.

Officinal preparations.--Tincture of leaves: dilutions.

Catarrhal affections and diseases of the mucous membranes.--Eclectic.

Chronic catarrh of the nasal passages.

Chronic laryngitis and bronchitis.

_Asthma_, hurried (breathing?) with concomitant catarrhal affections of the bronchial mucous surfaces.

(It is a popular domestic remedy in _asthma_. Eclectic physicians value it highly in throat affections. Some homoeopathic physicians, Drs. Small, Kendall and others have used it with gratifying results.--Hale.)

_Horses_ that eat of the leaves mixed in hay are cured or relieved of the _heaves_ and chronic loose cough.

Catarrh of the bladder.

Dr. Hale did not prove this remedy. All symptoms except the last one are clinical, that is, they disappeared while the patient was taking the remedy but they have not been produced on the healthy. The last symptom is a pathogenetic symptom verified by cure. There is, however, a proving of silphium but it is buried deep in the dust that covers old reports and has not seen the light of day for many a year. I reprint it here from the _Hahnemannian Monthly_, Volume 8, June, 1873, page 536, from the report of a meeting of the Philadelphia County Homoeopathic Society.

"Silphium lac.--Dr. G. A. Hall, in the April number of the Medical Investigator gives a summary of a proving. (The first decimal trituration was given in doses of two grains gradually increased to ten grains every two hours.)

"It produces a scraping, tickling and irritation of the fauces and throat; nausea, sick, faint feeling and a sense of goneness in the epigastrium; a desire to hawk and scrape the throat, throwing off a thin viscid mucus. The irritation extends up the posterior nares, involving the mucous membrane of the nasal passages, producing sneezing, followed by a discharge of limpid, acrid mucus from the nose, attended with constriction and pressure in the supra-orbital region. Engorgement and thickening of the mucous membrane of the throat as far down as could be seen; rough cough, attended with the expectoration of yellow mucus; contraction and tightness of lungs, constant disposition to raise; hacking, spasmodic cough; tongue covered with whitish slimy coat attended with dry sensation as if burned with hot soup; urine high colored and scant, frequent passages with sense of heat at the meatus urinarius during passage of urine; stools natural in form but covered with whitish, slimy mucus. An internal feverish sensation; pulse not accelerated; want of appetite.

"=Clinical Observation.= For ten years, I have used silphium in asthma with large quantities of stringy mucus, in influenza, coryza, catarrh, and believe it to be the best remedy we have in phthisis when gray or yellow mucus is expectorated copiously, causing rapid exhaustion. I use the second decimal trituration in one or two-grain doses every two hours until expectoration is diminished perceptibly and then at intervals of four or six hours until expectoration is diminished to a degree consistent with other symptoms of the case."

In spite of this good start, rosin-weed did not have any better fortune with the homoeopaths than with the eclectics. It never got into the text books. After transient popularity in the journals, it sank back into obscurity and has remained as a remedy for asthma in the memory of a few of the older practitioners from whom it is occasionally handed on by oral tradition.

It was in 1872 when rosin-weed was enjoying its brief publicity and when the epidemic of epizoötic among the horses created a public interest in veterinary medicines, that my father, Dr. Alexander H. Laidlaw, discovered its remarkable curative power in hay fever, as related in