ROTTLERA TINCTORIA

KAMELA

Description:  Natural Order, Euphorbiaceae.  A small tree, from ten to fifteen feet high, native to India, China, Southern Arabia,  and Northern Australia.  Leaves  alternate, oblong, pointed, entire, three-nerved, five to seven inches long.  Flowers  dioecious,  without  corollas,  in terminal  panicles. Sterile flowers, calyx two-cleft, stamens thirty to forty.  Fertile flowers, calyx three to five-cleft, ovary ovate, style three-feathered.  Capsule roundish, three-valved, the size of a small cherry; covered with minute, sessile, roundish glands of a bright red color. (Roxberry.)

The powder that adheres to the capsules, is the part used in medicine.  It is granular, mostly resinous, of an orange-red or brick-red color, with very little taste or smell.  With water it mixes only indifferently, and is scarcely affected by it; but ether and alcohol act on it well, and so do solutions of the caustic alkalies and their carbonates.

Properties and Uses:  This powder enjoys a high repute in Eastern Asia, as infallibly removing tapeworm.  As yet, it is scarcely known in America; but the accounts of several English physicians of eminence go far toward confirming its Asiatic reputation.   Dr. Mackinnon gave it to fifty patients, and it failed but twice; and Dr. Addison reports but two failures out of ninety-five cases.  It acts freely on the bowels, sometimes inducing six or seven thin stools in a few hours; and the entire worm usually comes away, dead.  The powder is given in doses ranging from fifty to one hundred and fifty grains; or the ethereal extract is used in ten-grain doses.