Hop hornbeam

Low-grade, recurring intermittent fever in a weak, debilitated patient with poor appetite

Chronic wasting with pale, flabby, atonic tissue and slow, sluggish digestion

Overview. Ostrya virginiana, the American hop hornbeam, is a small understory tree of eastern North American woodlands, related to the hazels and birches, named for its hop-like fruiting clusters. The physiomedical and eclectic traditions used the inner bark and heartwood as a bitter, warming tonic and antiperiodic, placing it among the tissue-restoring agents given for depleted, feverish, or scrofulous constitutions. It never became a major herb of commerce and is little used today, remaining chiefly of historical interest.

Clinical Notes. Nineteenth century physiomedical writers reached for hop hornbeam bark in patients whose vitality had been worn down by recurring low fevers, poor appetite, and general debility, particularly where the tissues seemed lax and atonic rather than tense or inflamed.

Properties and Uses. The bark and the inner or heart-wood of this tree are used in medicine. They are stimulating and moderately astringing, slow and permanent in action, and quite bitter. Their action is of the alterative tonic order.

Description. Natural Order, Cupuliferae. In the same family with oak, beech, and chestnut. Slender trees, with very dense and tough wood, twenty to thirty feet high, in rich woods, with a brownish and finely furrowed bark, much like the carpinus, (blue beech.) Flowers dioecious; sterile in drooping aments, of about twelve stamens in the axil of a scale-like bract, filaments somewhat united; fertile numerous in a short terminal catkin, with small deciduous bracts, the involucre enlarging so as to form a sort of bladdery sac inclosing the fruit, and a number of these forming a cone-like strobile much resembling the strobile of the hop.