Tiger Lily

Pelvic heaviness and a dragging, bearing-down sensation suggesting uterine prolapse, worse after prolonged standing or too early rising after childbirth

Sharp neuralgic pain radiating from an ovary down the inner thigh, accompanied by cardiac distress or a sense of pressure under the left breast

Overview. Tiger lily is the common name for a lily native to eastern Asia, long cultivated as an ornamental and naturalized in parts of North America, where the fresh flowering plant was adopted by nineteenth century eclectic physicians as a specific remedy for pelvic complaints in women. The whole fresh plant, particularly the flowering tops, was tinctured to make the eclectic preparation known as Specific Medicine Tiger Lily. It never entered mainstream Western herbal practice and today survives mainly as a historical curiosity and as a homeopathic remedy prepared from the same fresh plant material.

Clinical Notes. Eclectic writers reached for tiger lily specifically in cases of pelvic congestion with a feeling of uterine heaviness or prolapse, especially when this followed childbirth and the woman had risen from bed too soon or the pelvic tissues were slow to regain tone.

Action and Therapy. This remedy has been acquired from Homeopathy and is reputed slowly effective in controlling uterine irritation and congestion, being employed also to allay the nausea of pregnancy and of uterine irritability, in congestive dysmenorrhea, and chronic ovarian neuralgia with darting, burning pain in the ovaries. It is also said to be of service when pelvic weight and prolonged lochia accompany a tardy recovery from parturition and in the bearing-down discomfort incident to prolapsus uteri.

Therapy. These symptoms of uterine disease, cured or relieved by tiger lily, show the action of the remedy within a limited sphere; but it is probable that it has a much wider range of action, as we find that the common white meadow lily was employed by the early settlers in this country as a general and local tonic in prolapsus uteri; and as a tonic in debilitated states of the female organs of generation, and in dropsy, while the root of the white pond lily was used as a local application to ulcers and inflammations.