American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy

In the distress following the adjustment of fractured bones or reduction
of dislocations, it is especially useful and satisfactory.
It is often applied to local painful conditions with benefit. It relieves
toothache, local neuralgias, and the pain of developing felons and boils.
In these cases it exhibits active anodyne properties.
It acts in close harmony with the vegetable uterine remedies, promoting
the influence of cimicifuga, the viburnums, senecio, helonias, pulsatilla and
dioscorea.
PLANTAGO. Plantago major.
Synonyms—Plantain, Rib wort, Rib grass, Ripple grass.
CONSTITUENTS—
The leaves contain a resin, citric and oxalic acids. There is no
alkaloid or glucoside.
PREPARATIONS—
Specific plantago. Dose from one to five drops.
The juice of the leaves is used, dissolved in alcohol.
Therapy—The remedy is of value in the internal treatment of all diseases
of the blood. Scrofula, syphilis, specific or non-specific glandular
disease, and mercurial poisoning. It is used in ulcerations of the mucous
membrane, due to depraved conditions. It may be given in diarrhea,
dysentery, the diarrhea of consumption, cholera infantum, and where
there are longstanding hemorrhoids. It is also given in female disorders,
attended with fluent discharges, and in hematuria, also in dysuria and
some forms of passive hemorrhage. It would thus seem to possess marked
astringent properties, as well as those of an alterative character. The older
physicians ascribe an active influence to it, in the cure of the bites of
venomous serpents, spiders, and poisonous insects. A simple but
important influence is that exercised in tooth-ache. The juice on a piece
of cotton applied to a tooth cavity, or to the sensitive pulp, has
immediately controlled intractable cases of toothache. It seems to
exercise a sedative influence upon pain in the nerves of the face, and
relieves many cases of earache and tic-douloureux. In the nocturnal
incontinence of urine, in young children, accompanied with a large flow
of colorless urine, this agent has produced curative results in many
cases.
Ellingwood’s American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy - Page 353