Читать книгу Madame Young's Guide to Health - Amelia Young - Страница 99

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This plant rises from two to four feet in hight, resembling a shrub, and sending out hollow, woody stems; leaves in alternate order, compound, composed of several pairs, oval, pointed and nerved pinnæ, of a yellowish green color; flowers yellow, forming a spike consisting of five petals; the pod is curved and short. It grows in Canada, along the Ottawa river, in great quantities. It has been customary to reject the pedicles of the leaves of senna, but this is mere prejudice, for both leaves and pedicles act in the same way. The American senna operates milder than the senna that is imported, but it must be given in a larger dose.

Pour a pint of boiling water on eight drachms of American senna, and put a teaspoonful of ginger, or the powder of masterwort root, to it; let it stand in the pot for fifteen minutes for use; sweetened, with milk in it, it will prove a mild purge without griping. Children may take one or two teacupsful twice a day. Adults may take a desert-spoonful of the powder, with a teaspoonful of ginger, night and morning. As a safe and gentle purge, the following electuary is an excellent laxative for loosening the bowels of persons of costive habits: Take of senna leaves, powdered, six ounces, masterwort or ginger, one ounce, pulp of French prunes one pound, pulp of tamarinds two ounces, molasses one pint and a half, essential oil of caraway two drachms; boil the pulps in the molasses to the consistence of honey, then add the powders, and when the mixture cools put in the oil, and mix the whole intimately. Dose, a teaspoonful twice a day.