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The chief vegetable purgatives are aloes, colocynth, gamboge, jalap, scammony, seeds of castor-oil plant, croton-oil, elaterium, the hellebores, and colchicum. All these have, either alone or combined, proved fatal. The active principle in aloes is aloin; of jalap, jalapin; of white hellebore, veratria; and of colchicum, colchicin.
This indefinite meaning of the word fecula has created numerous mistakes in pharmaceutic chemistry; Elaterium, for instance, is said to be fecula, and, in the original sense of the word, it is properly so called, inasmuch as it is procured from a vegetable juice by spontaneous subsidence, but in the limited and modern acceptation of the term it conveys an erroneous idea; for instead of the active principle of the juice residing in fecula, it is a peculiar proximate principle, sui generis, to which I have ventured to bestow the name of Elatin.
If the blood be waterish as it is in dropsical subjects and flows out easily on account of its thinness, it will be a good plan to draw off the water by purging with agaric, elaterium and coloquintida. Sweating is also useful in this case, as by it the noxious matter is carried off, and the motion of the blood to other parts.
His power is displayed much more at this epoch than by the control he can exert over the process of coction. Now may he invoke the virtues of the hellebores, the white and the black, now may he use elaterium.
I asked him how on earth it got there; but I could only learn that the woman was fifty-six inches round the waist, and that he had treated her with elaterium. That leads me to another point. You ask me whether his cures are really remarkable, and, if so, what his system is.
Take of powdered jalap 5 gr., powdered rhubarb 5 gr., powdered scammony 5 gr., powdered elaterium 1/2 gr., bitartrate of potash 1/2 drm., sulphate of potash 1/2 drm., and syrup of ginger sufficient to make into pills; mix and divide into five pills. These five pills given at once form an excellent hydragogue cathartic to clear the chest, relieve breathing and diminish the dropsical effusion.
Amid the wayside rubbish grows one of the gourd family, Ecbalium elaterium, commonly called the squirting cucumber, whose fruit a rough and extremely bitter little cucumber is the size of a date. When ripe, the fleshy core resolves into a liquid in which float the seeds.
On one occasion this advance came near having serious consequences. I had compounded some pills containing a minute quantity of elaterium. The doctor gave them to a neighboring youth affected with a slight indisposition in which some such remedy was indicated. The directions were very explicit, one pill every hour until the desired effect was produced.
Boerhaave relates, that he was relieved of the gout by drinking the juice mixed with whey. MOMORDICA Elaterium. SPIRTING CUCUMBER. Fruit L. E. D. Elaterium is a strong cathartic, and very often operates also upwards. Two or three grains are accounted in most cases a sufficient dose.
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