Tiger Lily. Lilium tigrinum.
PREPARATIONS—
- Specific Medicine Tiger Lily. Dose, from one to ten minims.
Physiological Action—In 1863 Dr. Jeffries Wyman reported a case in which vomiting, purging, drowsiness, etc., were believed to have been produced in a little girl by the pollen of the tiger lily.
Tiger Lily seems to act upon the sympathetic nerves of the pelvis, increasing their strength and tone. It operates through the spinal cord, decreasing sexual irritability and materially improving the pelvic circulation. This influence is exercised best when the uterus and ovaries are greatly engorged and if there be displacement or subinvolution. Those conditions which occur from getting up too soon after confinement are improved by it, and those where the parts are slow in recovering tone, from any cause, or where there is danger of permanent prolapse from engorgement, are benefited by it.
Specific Symptomatology—Neuralgic pain in the uterus, ovaries, and mammae, acid leucorrhea excoriating to the labia, causing an eruption about the vulva and inflammation of the vagina; nausea from uterine disease or pregnancy; headache from uterine disease; nervous sick-headache; chronic inflammation of the uterus, with displacement; tedious recovery after child-birth; amenorrhea, with burning pain in the ovaries; distress about the heart, with prolapse of the uterus; pain under the left breast; dysmenorrhea; neuralgic pain in the uterus and ovaries extending down the inside of the thighs; a sense of weight and downward pressure in the lower abdomen; uterine displacements in general from debility.
Therapy—These symptoms of uterine disease, cured or relieved by tiger lily, show the action of the remedy within a limited sphere; but it is probable that it has a much wider range of action, as we find that the common white meadow lily was employed by the early settlers in this country as a general and local tonic in prolapsus uteri; and as a tonic in debilitated states of the female organs of generation, and in dropsy, while the root of the white pond lily was used as a local application to ulcers and inflammations.
Prof. John King says:
"I recollect a lady who, several years since, was pronounced by several physicians to have uterine cancer, and which resisted all their treatment; she was permanently cured by a squaw, who gave her to drink freely of the decoction of a root, as well as to inject it in the vagina, which proved to be that of the white pond lily—Nuphar Alba. (Nymphaea odorata."
Guided by the influence of these agents on the symptoms of disease, and by the diseases cured or relieved by them, we conclude that their action is similar.
Dr. Baldwin, of Michigan, uses the fluid extract of Nuphar Lutea in the local treatment of chronic uterine disease of whatever character or however severe, with the most gratifying results. His experience has extended over several years. The preparation is applied in full strength with cotton or on a tampon.
The American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy, 1919, was written by Finley Ellingwood, M.D.
It was scanned by Michael Moore for the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine.
