The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines, Trinidad Hermenegildo Pardo de Tavera [book club suggestions TXT] 📗

The oil is yellow, syrupy, transparent, odorless, insipid.

Botanical Description.—A tree with leaves bunched or clustered, 3–5 lobulate with as many nerves. Petioles about as long as the leaves. Flowers white, terminal in panicles, the pistillate mixed with the more numerous staminate flowers. Staminate: Calyx monophyllous, cylindrical, 2-toothed; corolla, 5 linear petals twice as long as the calyx; stamens 20 or more, joined in a column at their bases. Pistillate: Calyx and corolla as above; ovary of 2 or 3 uniovulate locules, encircled by a disk; style 2-or 3-branched. Seed vessel large, ovate, compressed, fleshy, 2 sutures at right angles, 2 compartments, in each a hard nut.

Habitat.—Grows all over Luzon and is well known to the natives.

Croton Tiglium, L. (C. glandulosum, C. muricatum, Blanco.)

Nom. Vulg.—Tuba kamaisa, Tag.; The Purging Croton, Eng.

Uses.—The fruit is used by the Filipinos to intoxicate the fish in ponds and sluggish streams. The seeds contain an oil that is official in all Pharmacopœias as one of the most powerful hydragogue cathartics. As it is intensely irritating it should never be administered alone but combined with other substances, such as castor oil, or in pill form. The internal dose is 1 to 2 drops. It is considered a specific for lead colic and is indicated when not only purgation but active irritation of the digestive canal is desired.

Applied to the skin it is a strong irritant causing rapid and painful vesication. Great care should be exercised not to raise the hands to the eyes after touching the oil, as serious inflammation might result.

Botanical Description.—A small tree, 8–9° high, with rough trunk. Leaves alternate, ovate, acute, minutely serrate, both surfaces beset with sharp hairs. Flowers yellowish-white, monœcious. Staminate: Fewer than the pistillate, growing above them; calyx 5-toothed; corolla, 5 woolly petals; stamens 16, joined in the center. Pistillate: Calyx 5-toothed; corolla much less developed than in the staminate; ovary free, 3 uniovulate locules; styles 3, bifid. Seed vessel dry, with thin envelope bristling with stiff hairs; 3 carpels each containing a seed.

Habitat.—Common in Luzon.

Acalypha Indica, L. (A. Caroliniana, Blanco.)

Nom. Vulg.—Not known.

Uses.—This plant is not used medicinally in the Philippines, but is very common in India. Dr. G. Bidie, of Madras, states that the expressed juice of the leaves is in great repute, wherever the plant grows, as an emetic for children and is safe, certain and speedy in its action. Like ipecacuanha it seems to have little tendency to act on the bowels or depress the vital powers, and it decidedly increases the secretion of the pulmonary organs. Probably an infusion of the dried leaves or an extract prepared from the green plant would retain all its active properties. The dose of the expressed juice for an infant is a teaspoonful.

Dr. A. E. Ross speaks highly of its use as an expectorant, ranking it in this respect with senega; he found it especially useful in the bronchitis of children. He also makes favorable report of a cataplasm of the leaves as a local application to syphilitic ulcers and as a means of relieving the pain attendant on the bites of venomous insects.

The alleged purgative action of the root noticed by Ainslie is confirmed by Dr. H. E. Busteed, who reports having used the expressed juice of the root and leaves as a laxative for children.

Langley, a military surgeon, states that in Canara the natives employ the leaf juice in congestive headache, soaking pledgets of cotton with it and introducing them into the nasal fossæ; the resultant nose bleed relieves the headache. The powder of the dry leaves is dusted on ulcers and putrid sores. In asthma and bronchitis, both of children and adults, Langley has used this plant with good results, and he recommends 1.25–3.50 grams of the tincture (100 grams of the fresh plant to 500 of alcohol, 90°) repeated several times a day; the effect is expectorant, nauseant and, in large doses, emetic.

It must be noted that only the young, growing plants are active.

The flowers of another species, A. hispida, Burm., called bugos in Tag. and Vis., is used in India for the dysentery.

Botanical Description.—A little plant, about 3° high. Leaves alternate, broad, lanceolate, 5-nerved, serrate from middle to apex. Petioles much longer than the leaves, 2 stipules at their bases. Flowers greenish, monœcious in axillary spikes, pedunculate, as long as the leaves, crowned by a prolongation of the axis in the form of a cross. Staminate: Numerous, in upper part of spike; calyx 4 parts; no corolla; stamens 8–16, small, free. Pistillate: Less in number, at the base of the spike; perianth of 3 imbricated leaflets; ovary, 3 uniovulate locules; style, 3 branches which also subdivide. Capsule 3-celled, each cell containing a globose seed with cicatrix.

Habitat.—Luzon, Panay and Mindanao. Blooms in October.

Echinus Philippensis, H. Baillon. (Croton Philippense, Lamk.; Rottlera tinctoria, Roxb.; Mallotus Philippensis, Müll.)

Nom. Vulg.—Banato, Tag.; Buas, Vuas, Iloc.; Monkey-face Tree, Kamala or Kamala Dye, Indo-Eng.

Uses.—The capsular fruit of this plant is thickly beset with reddish glands and hairs, which, when brushed off and gathered in powder form, constitute the kamala dye of the Hindoos. It was mentioned by the Arabian physicians of the tenth century under the names of Kanbil and Wars. In India the powder is highly valued as a yellow dye-stuff for silk. Medicinally it is used as an anthelmintic, the English physician Mackinnon, of the Bengal Hospital, having been the first to scientifically prove this property; he reported that it was successful in expelling the tape-worm. It is now official in the Pharmacopœia of India and also in the U. S. P. as an anthelmintic and purgative; in Switzerland it is commonly given to expel the bothriocephalus which abounds there, the lake fish acting as hosts.

The dose recommended by the Pharmacopœia of India is 8–12 grams, divided in 3 or 4 doses. This amount sometimes causes nausea and colic; in the third or fourth stool the tænia is commonly expelled in a lifeless condition. Dujardin-Beaumetz advises a dose of 30 grams of castor oil in case the tænia has not been expelled 2 hours after the last dose of kamala. The powder is efficacious but the tincture seems to be surer; the dose is 6 grams for children and 20 for adults, given in divided doses in aromatic water every hour for 6 hours. This tincture is prepared by macerating 200 grams of kamala in 500 cc. alcohol for 7 days; then filtering with expression and adding enough alcohol to complete the 500 cc.

The powder is also used in India as a local application in herpes circinata. It is insoluble in water; in ether and alcohol it yields 80% of a red resin. Anderson noted that a concentrated ethereal solution of kamala after a few days formed a solid crystalline mass, yellow, very soluble in ether; this substance he named rottlerin, C11H10O3.

Botanical Description.—A tree, 6–8 meters high, covered with stellate groups of short yellow hairs. Leaves alternate, petiolate, rhomboid-oval or lanceolate, acuminate, 3-nerved, entire or slightly dentate, upper surface glabrous, lower surface covered with woolly hairs and powdery red glands. Flowers yellowish-green, small, diœcious, apetalous, in spikes. Staminate: By 3′s in the axil of each bract; perianth, 3 or 5 deeply cut, lanceolate lobules; stamens 15–25, free, inserted in the center of the flower. Pistillate: In the axil of each bract; ovary, 3 locules each with 1 ovule, covered like the leaves with hairs and yellow, granular glands. Seed vessel globose, 3-celled, like ovary covered with hairs and glands.

Habitat.—Mountains of Morong, San Mateo, Tarlak, Bosoboso, Ilocos Norte, Albay and Batangas.

Ricinus communis, L. (Variety microcarpus, Müll.)

Nom. Vulg.—Tag̃antag̃an, Lig̃asina, Tag.; Tag̃antag̃an, Tawatawasig̃a, Iloc.; Castor Oil Plant, Eng.

Uses.—A purgative oil is expressed from the seeds, called “Aceite de Ricino” (castor oil). It operates mechanically in the intestinal tract and its action is rapid and is indicated whenever it is desired simply to empty the intestines without producing any irritating effect; it is, therefore, a purgative indicated in diseases of children, in pregnancy, and in hemorrhoidal congestions where a non-irritating evacuation of the rectum is desired. It is an anthelmintic, though not ordinarily given alone, but in combination with other drugs of a purely anthelmintic action, the object being to expel the worms which have been attacked by the specific.

Oil extracted simply by expression is less purgative than that obtained by treating the seeds with bisulphide of carbon and absolute alcohol; also less purgative than the seeds themselves, because it contains only a very small proportion of a drastic principle existing exclusively in the seeds; this principle is completely dissolved in the oil extracted by chemical process.

It is pale yellow in color, very viscid, with a characteristic mouldy odor. The purgative dose is 10–30 grams. A small dose may purge as actively as a larger one provided that the patient drink abundantly after the administration of the drug. The best method of disguising its taste is by giving it in half a cup of very strong, hot coffee. Just before the dose, take a swallow of coffee to disguise the taste even more effectually.

Castor oil enters into the composition of elastic collodion (simple collodion, 30 grams, castor oil, 2 grams). The leaves pounded and boiled are applied as a poultice to foul ulcers.

Botanical Description.—There are two forms of this variety in the Philippines, possessing the same properties and known by the same common name: R. viridis, Müll. (R. communis, Blanco) and R. subpurpurascens, Müll.; the former is the more common and has a glabrous, fistular stem. Leaves peltate, palmately cleft in 7 or 9 lobules, lanceolate, serrate. Petioles long. Flowers greenish, monœcious, the staminate ones in large panicled clusters below the pistillate. Filaments numerous, subdivided into several anther-bearing branches. Pistillate flowers, 3 sepals, 3 styles. Seed vessel, 3 prickly capsules, containing solitary seeds.

The R. subpurpurascens is distinguished from the former by bearing 2 glandules at the base of the leaves, the mulberry color of which latter suggests its common name, Tag̃antag̃an na morado, Tag., Vis.

Habitat.—Very common in Luzon, Mindanao and other islands.