Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
In addition, this page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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DECOCTION OF SARSAPARILLA (COMPOUND)
Mix 4 pints of boiling decoction of sarsaparilla, 10 drachms of sliced sassafras, 10 drachms of guaiacum-wood shavings, 10 drachms of bruised stick-licorice, and 3 drachms of mezeron-bark; boil 1/4 hour, and strain. Used in cutaneous diseases, chronic rheumatism and scrofula. Dose: 2 ounces, 2 or 3 times a day.
This is a pharmacy preparation copied into the sick-room chapter, and two of its five ingredients are not things that should be boiled and swallowed. The notes below explain the units and why the formula is now closed.
- Mezereon bark is the disqualifying ingredientMezereon is the bark of Daphne mezereum, whose active daphnetoxin and mezerein are severe vesicants: they blister skin on contact and cause burning of the mouth and throat, vomiting, bloody diarrhoea and kidney irritation when taken internally. Three drachms is roughly 12 grams of it, spread across a batch dosed by the ounce, and there is no margin in that.
- SassafrasSassafras root bark is high in safrole, which the U.S. FDA banned as a food additive in 1960 after it was shown to cause liver tumours in animals. Commercially sold sassafras tea today is safrole-reduced; raw shavings boiled for a quarter hour are not.
- Guaiacum woodLignum vitae shavings were a standard antisyphilitic and antirheumatic through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Guaiac resin now appears mainly as a food antioxidant in tiny quantities, and the several living Guaiacum species are CITES-listed, so the shavings are not legitimately available in bulk.
- The circular first line"Boiling decoction of sarsaparilla" is not water but a separate pharmacopoeial preparation given elsewhere in such books, typically sarsaparilla root simmered in water and made up to volume. The formula presupposes that the simple decoction has already been made; without it the quantity here is meaningless.
- Drachms and the doseAn apothecaries' drachm is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, or one-eighth of an apothecaries' (troy) ounce by weight, about 3.9 grams, so 10 drachms is roughly 39 grams, a little under 1.4 modern (avoirdupois) ounces. The prescribed dose of 2 ounces two or three times daily is a real therapeutic dose, not a flavouring, which is why the mezereon content matters.
- If you want the flavourRoot beer and sarsaparilla soda descend from this family of decoctions and are made from safrole-free extracts. Use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
Compound decoction of sarsaparilla was an official preparation in British and American pharmacopoeias for much of the nineteenth century, one of a family of "woods" formulas built on sarsaparilla, sassafras and guaiacum that had been prescribed since the sixteenth century for syphilis and, later, for the vaguer conditions listed here: cutaneous disease, chronic rheumatism and scrofula, the last being tuberculous swelling of the neck lymph nodes. Household cookbooks of the period are often said to have carried a nursery and sick-room chapter reprinting such formulas from dispensatory manuals, on the assumption that a woman running a house was also running its dispensary. Sarsaparilla's reputation as a blood purifier outlived its medical credibility and passed into the soft-drink trade, which is where most readers now meet the name, while mezereon and guaiacum dropped out of the pharmacopoeias altogether as their toxicity and inefficacy became clear.