American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy

train of the symptoms supervened. His vitality began to wane, and he
became so weak that he could not sit up. His hair came out, and a skin
disease pronounced by experts to be psoriasis, appeared upon his
extremities first, and afterward upon his body. In the writer's opinion, the
condition had but little resemblance to psoriasis. It seemed more like an
acute development of leprosy than any other known condition.
This advanced rapidly, his nails began to fall off, he lost flesh, and a
violent iritis of the left eye developed and ulceration of the cornea in the
right set in, and for this difficulty he was referred to Prof. H. M. Martin,
President of the Chicago Ophthalmic College.
Dr. Martin gave him ten grains of the iodide of potassium three times
daily, and fed him freely upon phospho-albumin. The loss of hair was
stopped, but no other favorable results were obtained. The condition
progressed rapidly towards an apparently fatal termination. At this
juncture, Dr. Martin asked the writer to see the case with him. It looked
as if there was no possible salvation for the patient, but as a dernier
ressort, the writer suggested Echinacea twenty drops every two hours,
and the phospho-albumin to be continued. With this treatment, in from
four to six weeks, the patient regained his normal weight of more than
one hundred and fifty pounds and enjoyed afterward as good health as
ever in his life.
Echinacea has been used with great success in aggravated and prolonged
cases of rhus poisoning, both locally and internally.
The agent has been long in use among the Indians in the West as a sure
cure for snake bite. It has created a furor among the practitioners, who
have used it in the bites of poisonous animals, that has made the reports,
apparently, too exaggerated to establish credulity on the part of the
inexperienced. Cases that seemed hopeless have rapidly improved after
the agent was applied and administered. There is at present no
abatement in the enthusiasm. One physician controlled the violent
symptoms from the bite of a tarantula, and quickly eliminated all trace of
the poison with its use.
Dr. Banta of California treated a man bitten by a scorpion, reported in
the Eclectic Medical Journal, with echinacea with rapid cure.
In a paper read at the Ohio State Eclectic Medical Society in 1895, Dr.
Gregory Smith stated that in 1871 Dr. H. C. F. Meyer commenced the use
Ellingwood’s American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy - Page 188