Interesting history of the Panax (Quinquefolium) of Linnaeus, the ginseng of the Chinese, from the archives of history and medical science.

Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Interesting history of the Panax (Quinquefolium) of Linnaeus, the ginseng of the Chinese, from the archives of history and medical science. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    14/18
    MALVA. Formerly the Malva was admitted among the common articles of diet. To this purpose it is referred to by Horace. The Chinese are said to eat the leaves of Malva either raw as salad, or boiled as spinnach. Horace also speaks of Iieves nialvse, apparently meaning light of digestion. There are many varieties. Linnaeus refers to twenty-six in the 14th edition of his Systema Vegetablium.—See Reese's Cyclopaedia, vol. 23. The species of which the present Syrup of Ginseng and Malva is compounded, is the particular kind employed by a gentleman in Maryland in three cases of obstinate whooping cough, attended previously to its application with fits and excessive strangulation. He remarks— These three cases occurred in the winter of 1840, and commenced at different periods within a month or two. Near the 1st of March, the eldest, a boy of about five years of age, (in other respects a remarkably healthy child) was discovered to be strangling or choking with phlegm about four o'clock in the morning. He was at once taken up, and after a frightful spasm of four or five minutes, seemed to lose all power for breathing, became livid in the face, relaxed in all his muscles, and was finally laid upon the bed as a dead child—so considered by both my wife and myself; in a minute or two more, again