PLANTS AS DRUG-MAKERS

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 10, 11 July 1936, Page 27

PLANTS AS DRUG-MAKERS

Hops, more familiar in another guise, provide doctors with a sedative drug known as lupuline (says the "Morning Post"). :

They were included in a collection of about 50 plants used in medicine shown at the Chelsea Physic Garden, when Sir William Willcox, medical adviser to the Home Office, delivered his Chadwick lecture on "Plant Pharmacology and Medical Practice." .

Various preparations of hops have been used to control hysteria, nervousness, and insomnia.

Speaking in this historic garden of medicine, Sir William found no praise too high for plants as manufacturers of useful drugs. "The most marvellous variety of chemical compounds are synthesised by them," he stated, "more complex and delicate than any produced artificially." To the extreme purity of plant products he attributed the fact that.they seldom.acted as'tissue poisons, whereas with chemicals produced in the laboratory injurious by-products were likely to be formed. •

"The long list "of "liver "poison's," Sir William added, "is practically free from substances of plant origin, though some of the most powerful bf -therapeutic.

substances and poisons are of plant origin. ' :

"So complex are plant products;" he emphasised, "that' it is often difficult or even impossible to say to which particular active principle a plant owes its virtue. Opium, for example, contains as many as 20 alkaloids and its therapeutic action differs in some_ respects from the chief of them, morphine." .. ■ ;■ - ]

When a plant did "its work; as Nature's laboratory, he said L the only raw materials available were pure air, water, sunlight, climatic temperature, and the simple mineral salts absorbed from the soil.

Sir William also disclosed that the foxglove had lately attained a new interest for medicine. When the last British Pharmacopoeia, was published in 1932, the foxglove's active principle was supposed to be a drug known as "Digitoxin," but it had since been found to contain three very important alkaloids, "Digilanid A, B, and C." Other plants included in- .the collection ranged from , the Chinese. : "Ma Hung," which acts on the respiratory system, to lily of the valley, which produces a substance.capable of acting on-'the-heart.