Sedatives
Wild Black Cherry
The Indian uses of the popular medicinal plant wild black cherry have already been enumerated under the categories of "Childbirth," "Coughs," "Diarrhea," and "Hemorrhoids." The Meskwaki tribe made a sedative tea of the root bark, and this drink has long been popular in domestic American medicine.
All parts of this plant yield hydrocyanic acid when steeped in water. The medicinal properties of wild cherry are destroyed by boiling; thus the plant is allowed to soak only in warm water.
The bark has been in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia since 1820 and has been used as a sedative and in cough medicines.
The wild cherry tree sometimes grows taller than ninety feet and attains a trunk diameter of four feet. The straight trunk is covered with a rough, black bark, and the leaves are bright green above and hairy on the lower surface. Numerous small, white, five-petaled flowers appear on the ends of leafy branches during summer, and the cherries ripen in late August or early September.
When used in medicines, the bark is collected in autumn when it contains the greatest concentration of precursors to hydroctanic acid. Alice Henkel, an early expert on medicinal plants, cautioned against storing the bark for longer than one year, stating that it deteriorates with time. She added that young, thin bark was preferred and that bark from small or old branches was discarded.
PassionFlower
The Houma Indians added the pulverized root of the indigenous passionflower herb to their water, believing that it acted as a systemic tonic.
Although this plant was used to some extent by Indians of South America, it did not receive very much attention in North American medical circles until the latter part of the nineteenth century when the flowering and fruiting tops were used to relieve insomnia and to sothe nerves.
Little is known about the pharmacology of this plant; however, it is an ingredient in several commercial drug preparations.
The passionflower is named for its large flowers which supposedly represented the passion of Jesus to the early Spanish explorers of this continent.
The plants, found throughout the Southern United States, produce their flowers from May to July. The drug is collected for medicines after some of the yellowish fruits, which are about the size of a hen's egg, have developed. The dried flowering tops were official in the National Formulary from 1916 to 1936.
Three Leaved Hop Tree
The indigenous three-leaved hop tree sometimes called the wafer ash, was used by the Menominees as a sacred medicine. They mixed the root bark into other medicines to give them added potency.
It was introduced in the medical literature by Rafinesque in his work Medical Botany in 1830.
He listed the leaves as being useful in the treatment of wounds and in the destruction of intestinal worms. Following this work and several others, the electic practitioners adopted wafer ash for a wide variety of problems.
It is included under "Sedatives" only because its common name suggests that it was regarded as being similar to the hop tree, which was an official sedative drug.
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