Manaca

Stiffness and contraction of muscles about the shoulders limiting the patient's ability to raise the arms, with accompanying neuralgic pain and cardiac irritability

Rheumatic pain of the feet and lower legs severe enough to require a crutch, in a patient with anemia and uric acid in the urine

Overview. Manaca is the root of a small flowering shrub of the nightshade family, native to the understory of tropical Brazilian forests and prized there for its fragrant, color-changing blossoms as well as its medicinal root. Eclectic physicians of the nineteenth century imported the root and used tinctures of it as an alterative and antirheumatic, particularly for rheumatism associated with gonorrhea or syphilis. The plant is now recognized botanically as a species of Brunfelsia, a genus whose members are also known to contain potent neurotoxic alkaloids, and its historical use sits uneasily alongside this modern toxicological knowledge.

Clinical Notes. Eclectic writers reached for manaca chiefly in chronic muscular rheumatism where stiffness and contracture, rather than frank joint destruction, dominated the picture, especially when a rheumatic or gonorrheal history accompanied cardiac irritability or neuralgic pain.

Action and Therapy. Diuretic and probably alterative. It is employed along the Amazon for rheumatism and syphilis. It is capable of producing gastro-enteritis and death. Manaca has been proposed for rheumatism confined more to the muscles and tendons than to the articular forms, acting best when there is dull, heavy pain, soft skin and the absence of fever. It is thought to act somewhat like guaiac.

Action, Medical Uses, and Dosage. Jamaica dogwood possesses active properties, its chief uses being to control pain and to produce sleep. Dr. Isaac Ott (see Pharmacology of Newer Materia Medica, p. 597), who made extensive experiments with the drug, declares its physiological effects to be essentially as follows: It increases the salivary and cutaneous secretions; slows the pulse, increases the arterial tension, succeeded by a fall of tension due to a weakening of the heart; dilates the pupils, except when passing into a state of asphyxia, when contraction takes place; it does not affect the irritability of the motor nerve fibers, nor does it attack the peripheral sensory nerve endings; it reduces reflex action by stimulating Setschenow's...