Nature Bulletin No. 187   April 11, 1981
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
George W. Dunne, President
Roland F. Eisenbeis, Supt. of Conservation

****:MEDICINAL PLANTS

In springtime, many years ago, grandma made her family drink gallons 
of tea made by boiling roots of the sassafras. That was supposed to thin 
and purify the blood. Children were sent out to gather dandelion, curly 
dock, wild mustard, pokeberry and other greens as soon as they 
appeared -- not only because they added welcome variety to the diet of 
bread, meat, potatoes and gravy, but because some of them were also 
laxatives.

For a bad "cold on the lungs," she slapped a mustard plaster on the 
patient's back, and on his chest she put a square of red flannel soaked in 
goose grease. For whooping cough she used a syrup of red clover 
blossoms. She made cough medicine from the bloodroot plant, and a tea 
from the compass plant of the prairies was also used for fevers and 
coughs. She made a pleasant tea from the blossoms of the linden or 
basswood tree. For stomach aches she used tea from any of several 
aromatic herbs such as catnip, fennel, yarrow, peppermint, spearmint, 
sweetflag, wild ginger, bergamot and splice bush.

For asthma, she used a tea brewed from the common little vine-like 
cinquefoil; for rheumatism, a tea brewed from blossoms of the bull 
thistle, or from the early spring leaves of the wood nettle. For poison 
ivy she used the leaves of jewelweed, or the red juice from the root of 
bloodroot. When you got stung by a bee, you rubbed the wound with 
leaves from a white ash tree. For an aching tooth, you chewed the 
berries of the prickly ash or "toothache tree." Crushed leaves of the 
yarrow, or Nosebleed Weed, were used to stop bleeding. Dandelion 
roots are still used in tonics and liver medicines .

In pioneer days, doctors were scarce, medicines were scarce, and 
money was scarcer. The early settlers, learning from the Indians and by 
experiment, gathered and prepared their own remedies and tonics, 
mostly from wild native plants. There were few plants, including trees, 
from which the Indians did not use some part for some purpose. For 
Instance, malaria -- called "ague" or "chills and fever" -- was very 
common and sometimes fatal In many regions. Quinine, from the 
cinchona tree of South America, was the best cure but expensive and 
scarce. So, many native plants -- usually very bitter -- including the 
plant called "boneset," the bark of willow trees and the bark of the 
quaking aspen, were used as substitutes.

011 of witch hazel, distilled from Its twigs, Is still a favorite astringent 
used by barbers and by trainers of athletes. In the old days, white oak 
bark, dogwood bark, roots of the wild geranium and roots of the New 
Jersey Tea, were used for the same purpose. Oil of wintergreen from the 
teaberry, and oil of birch obtained by distilling the twigs and Inner bark 
of birch trees, were good for rheumatism.

Some of the old remedies are recognized, today, as "official" drugs by 
the Federal Food and Drug Administration. Others are listed but 
classified as "unofficial," because they have proven unsatisfactory. 
Many have been forgotten except by backwoods people. The 
availability of drug plants from all over the world, and the development 
of synthetics such as atabrine and the coal tar derivitives, have made it 
largely unnecessary to rely upon our wild plants. However, penicillin -- 
one of the great modern discoveries -- was derived from the common 
blue mold that grows on bread.