Ironweed

Painful, deficient menstruation with a dragging, congested feeling in the pelvis

Recurring intermittent (periodic) fever with a torpid liver, where a bitter hepatic tonic is wanted

Overview. Vernonia fasciculata, prairie ironweed, is a tall perennial composite native to prairies, streambanks, and open ground across the central and eastern United States, easily recognized by its dense corymbs of deep purplish-red disc flowers blooming in late summer. The root is the part used medicinally. It belongs to the physiomedicalist and older American eclectic root-and-herb tradition, where it was valued as a bitter tonic root with combined stimulating and relaxing qualities, used mainly for menstrual complaints and periodic (intermittent) fevers.

Clinical Notes. In the older physiomedical literature, ironweed root was reached for chiefly in two settings: painful or deficient menstruation with a sense of pelvic congestion, and recurring intermittent fevers where the liver was thought to be torpid and in need of a bitter hepatic stimulant.

Properties and Uses. The root is bitter, with stimulating and relaxing qualities, and leaving a full tonic impression. It has been commended in deficient and painful menstruation, and leucorrhea. The use to which it seems best adapted, is in the treatment of ague as a hepatic and an antiperiodic; in which connection several reliable physicians have commended it to me in high terms, and J.

Description. Natural Order, Compositae. Root perennial. Stem annual, four to ten feet high, an inch in diameter, purplish- green, striate, hollow, with a few short corymbose branches above. Leaves alternate, narrow-elliptical or lanceolate, tapering, four to eight inches long, serrate, coarse and rough. Flowers in crowded corymbose heads, all perfect, discoid, tubular, deep purplish-red; involucre of many appressed scales. Common on prairies, by streams, and in all places, through the West; sometimes in whole fields. Blooming from August to October.