Echinacea
Botanical: Echinacea
angustifolia (DE CANDOLLE)
Family: N.O. Compositae
---Synonyms---Black
Sampson. Coneflower. Niggerhead. Rudbeckia. Brauneria pallida (Nutt.).
---Parts Used---Root, dried; also rhizome.
---Habitat---America, west of Ohio, and cultivated in Britain.
---Description---Named
Echinacea by Linnaeus, and Rudbeckia, after Rudbeck, father
and son, who were his predecessors at Upsala.
The flowers are a rich
purple and the florets are seated round a high cone; seeds, four-sided
achenes. Root tapering, cylindrical, entire, slightly spiral,
longitudinally furrowed; fracture short, fibrous; bark thin; wood, thick,
in alternate porous, yellowish and black transverse wedges, and the
rhizome has a circular pith. It has a faint aromatic smell, with a
sweetish taste, leaving a tingling sensation in the mouth not unlike Aconitum
napellus, but without its lasting numbing effect.
---Constituents---Oil
and resin both in wood and bark and masses of inulin, inuloid, sucrose,
vulose, betaine, two phytosterols and fatty acids, oleic, cerotic, linolic
and palmatic.
---Medicinal
Action and Uses---Echinacea increases bodily resistance to
infection and is used for boils, erysipelas, septicaemia, cancer, syphilis
and other impurities of the blood, its action being antiseptic. It has
also useful properties as a strong alterative and aphrodisiac. As an
injection, the extract has been used for haemorrhoids and a tincture of
the fresh root has been found beneficial in diphtheria and putrid
fevers.
---Other
Species---
Echinacea purpurea has similar properties to E. angustifolia;
the fresh root of this is the part used.
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