Sweetfern

Chronic, watery diarrhea with general debility and poor tone, especially in children (the traditional 'ricket plant' picture)

Weeping, itching, blistered dermatitis from poison ivy contact, used as a topical wash or fomentation

Overview. Sweetfern is a small aromatic shrub of the bayberry family, native to dry, sandy, and open woodland soils across eastern and central North America. The fragrant, fern-like leaves are the part gathered, traditionally dried for infusion or made into a wash. It held a place in nineteenth-century physiomedicalist and eclectic practice as a gentle astringent tonic for the bowel and a topical remedy for irritated, weeping skin, and it still turns up in folk use for poison ivy exposure in regions where it grows wild.

Clinical Notes. In the older physiomedicalist framework sweetfern was reached for when tissue tone was slack, the picture being loose, watery stool with a generally lax, debilitated constitution rather than an acute inflammatory flux.

Properties and Uses. The leaves and shoots are fragrant, and mildly tonic-rather of the order of aromatic stimulants, and leaving a slight astringent impression upon the mucous membranes. They very gently promote digestion, especially in convalescence from acute forms of disease; and appear to exert an excellent influence upon the mesenteries and general assimilative apparatus, on which account they are good in scrofulous, rachitic, and mesenteric debility.

Properties and Uses. This root is moderately demulcent, and contains mild tonic properties about equally relaxant and stimulant. Its mild taste has created an opinion that it is nearly inert as a remedy; but in its own place it will be found among the most desirable articles of the Materia Medica.