Red osier dogwood

Heavy, prolonged uterine bleeding in a woman whose tissues feel generally lax and toneless rather than congested or inflamed

Weak, inefficient labor pains where the system is described as lax rather than obstructed, used alongside partus-preparing herbs

Overview. Red osier dogwood is a wetland shrub native across much of North America, easily recognized by its bright red winter stems and blue-white berries. Early American physiomedicalist and eclectic physicians used the dried stem and root bark as a milder, more astringent cousin of flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), reserving it chiefly for atonic conditions of the female reproductive tissues. It never entered mainstream pharmacopoeial use and today survives mainly as a historical curiosity within the physiomedicalist repertoire.

Clinical Notes. Physiomedicalist writers placed this bark toward the astringent end of the tissue-tone spectrum, using it where relaxation and lack of tone rather than heat or congestion seemed to be the picture: prolonged watery menstrual flow, a prolapsed or boggy uterus, or chronic leukorrhea in a woman who seemed generally toneless.

Properties and Uses. The bark is similar to that of cornus florida, but partakes more of the characters of a pure astringent, and less of those of a tonic. It is also more stimulating than the other dogwoods. It expends a considerable influence upon the uterus, and is of service in atonic conditions of that organ.

Description. Natural Order and Generic characters the same as in cornus circinata. C. SERICEA: A shrub eight feet high, with opposite and dusky-purple branches, and dark-red shoots; young twigs woolly. Leaves opposite, ovate; two to four inches long by half as wide, nearly smooth above, soft-pubescent beneath, on petioles an inch long. Flowers small, yellowishwhite, in depressed and woolly cymes; no involucre. Fruit a bright-blue, spherical berry. Common in wet places. June.