On pareira brava / by Daniel Hanbury.

  • Hanbury, Daniel, 1825-1875.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On pareira brava / by Daniel Hanbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    1/6
    7 L 7 ON PAREIRA B E A V A. BY DANIEL HANBURY, F.R.S., F.L.S. ,1 origin of the various stems and roots iira Brava is extremely obscure. By ..e drug is referred without question to reira Linn., a climbing plant of the nacece growing in the tropical regions and New World. .go the difficulty of purchasing Pareira juality in London induced me to seek West Indies. I accordingly procured ■3 firm of which I was then a member, the stems and roots of Cissampelos lected in Jamaica under the supervi- Wilson, director of the Bath Botanical :t island. The first importation was v herbarium specimens of the plant, . of which removed all doubt as to its > obtained specimens of stems of iira similarly authenticated, from cor- [ Trinidad, Brazil and Ceylon, materials it at once became evident xepted statement that Pareira Brava Cissampelos Pareira Linn, was erro- ’ t neither the stem nor the root of the nbled any of the forms of that drug with in commerce. -8 true Pareira Brava ?—To answer must look back to the early history having first given some account of . usually conceded to the Dutch tra- in his work De Medicina Brasiliensi, i »48, described a plant called by the ->eba, Cipo de Cobras or Herva de Nossa figure is scarcely recognizable, but : f the fruit as resembling the catkins f ignum coloris rosacei, e capsulis lupulo ■ cns) applies well enough to a Cissam- ■ ct C. glaberrima St. Hil. is known uguese names in Southern Brazil at . My friend Mr. J. Correa de Mello, ov. S. Paulo, has been good enough • ecimen of this plant and of its root ; find to be wholly unlike any sort of (88 not mention Pareira Brava was l as long ago as 171 Of ; and it is ug has been supposed to be derived that authors have identified it with was certainly first brought to Europe -se. It first attracted general atten- “ I irst pointed out in the Pharmacopoeia of -Mff, —— f- . Roy ale des Sciences, ann6e 1710, 5G. tion in 1688, when Michel Amelot, Marquis de Gournay, a privy councillor of Louis XIV., and a very distinguished political personage, brought it with him from Lisbon whither he had been sent as ambassador by the French king. There can be no doubt that the drug was considered to possess extra- ordinary properties. Rouille, the successor of Ame- lot in the Lisbon embassy, also took home with him to Paris some Pareira Brava ; and in 1710 we find it claiming the notice of the French Academy,* who requested Etienne-Francois Geoffroy, Professor of Medicine and Pharmacy in the College of France, to investigate its virtues. Jean-Claude-Adrien Helve- tius, a physician of great merit, who though a young man was consulted by Louis XIV. in his last days, and was afterwards attached to the court of Louis XV., tried the new drug still earlier,f and gave strong testimony in its favour. Both Geoffroy and Helvetius were correspondents of Sir Hans Sloane, that diligent promoter of science whose immense collections gave origin to the British Museum,—and among the Sloanian MSS. I have found a letter of HelvetiusJ addressed in 1715 to Monsieur Duyvenvoorde, ambassador from the States General to George I., a portion of which I will here quote :— “ I am extreamly pleased sr that you have apply’d yor- “ self to me for my advice about the use of the Pareira “ Brava which has been recomended to you, because I can “ give you a very good account of it haveing been one of “ the first that introduced it in France. I have made “ abundance of lucky experiments about it which have “ made this medicine very well known to me, wherefore “ I assure you, you can do nothing better than to make “ tryall of it. . . . The Pareira Brava is a root “ which comes to us from Brazil by way of Lisbon, but “ which the war has rendered pretty scarce ; however, it “ is to be found among the good druggists and is sold [at] “ Paris for 40 livres the pound. ’Tis called in Brazil the “ Universall Medicine, and made use of there in all kinds “ of distempers. A Capuchin monk who came from “ thence told me he could not give it a greater character “ than by assuring me that in all their voyages they car- “ ried the gospell in one pockett and the Pareira Brava “ in another. . . Helvetius recommended the finely-powdered root in five grain doses, to be taken in infusion warm like tea. Petiver, apothecary of London, and secretary to * Hist, de I’Acad. Royalc des Sciences, anno 1710, 56. t Helvetius, TraiU des Maladies les plus frdquentes et des remedes spdcifiques pour les gudrvr, Paris, 1703, 98. X Slonne MS., No. 3340, p. 291.—The letter has already been puWished in Phil. Trans, No. 346, Nov. and Doc. 1715, p. 365.