Pharmacographia : A history of the principal drugs of vegetable origin, met with in Great Britain and British India / by Friedrich A. Flückiger and Daniel Hanbury.

  • Friedrich August Flückiger
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pharmacographia : A history of the principal drugs of vegetable origin, met with in Great Britain and British India / by Friedrich A. Flückiger and Daniel Hanbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    great was the reputation of the new drug, that the small quantities first brought to Malacca were sold at the rate of 10 crowns per ganta, a weight of 24 ounces. Possibly the drug found its way to Europe even before that year, for we find a careful description of it in the posthumous works ^ of Valerius Cordus and Walther Ryft states in 1548 that the root was brought a few years ago to Venice. The reported good effects of China root on the Emperor Charles V. who was suffering from gout, acquired for the drug a great celebrity in Europe, and several works ^ were written in praise of its virtues. But though its powers were soon found to have been greatly over-rated, it still retained some reputation as a sudorific and alterative, and was much used at the end of the I7th century in the same way as sarsaparilla. It still retains a place in some modern pharma- copoeias. Description—The plant produces stout fibrous roots, here and there thickened into large tubers, which when dried become the drug China root. These tubers, as found in the market, are of irregularly cylindrical form, usually a little flattened, sometimes producing short knobby branches. They are from about 4 to 6 or more inches in length, and 1 to. 2 inches in thickness, covered with a rusty-coloured, rather shining bark, which in some specimens is smooth and in others more or less wrinkled. They have no distinct traces of rudimentary leaves, which however are perceptible on those of some allied species. Some still retain portions of the cord-like woody runners on which they grew ; the bases of a few roots can also be observed. The tubers mostly show marks of having been trimmed with a knife. China root is inodorous and almost insipid. A transverse section exhibits the interior as a dense granular substance of a pale fawn colour. Microscopic Structure—The outermost cortical layer is made up of brown, thick-walled cells, tangentially extended. They enclose numerous tufts of needle-shaped crystals of calcium oxalate, and reddish brown masses of resin. The bark is at once succeeded by the inner parenchyme which contrasts strongly with it, consisting of large, thin- walled, porous cells which are completely gorged with starch, but here and there contain colouring matter and bundles of crystals. The starch granules are large (up to 50 mkm.), spherical, often flattened and angular from mutual pressure. Like those of colchicum, they exhibit a radiate hilum: very frequently they have burst and run together, probably in consequence of the tubers having been scalded. The vascular bundles scattered through the parenchyme, contain usually two laige scalariform or reticulated vessels, a string of delicate thin-walled parenchyme, and elegant wood-cells with distinct incrusting layers and linear pores. Chemical Composition—The drug is not known to contain any substance to which its supposed medicinal virtues can be referred. We 1 Edit, by Conrad Gesuer, fol. 212 of the work quoted in the Appendix. .... Bericht der Natur .... der Wurtzel China, Wiirzburg, 1548. 4°. ' The earliest of which is by Andreas Vesalivis, Epistola rationem, modumque pro pinandi radicis Chymae [sic !] decocii, quo nuper invictis.nmu.s Carolus V. imperator u.ius est, Venet, 1546.
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