Tobacco

Rigid, spastic muscle tone with tetanic or convulsive contraction, historically relieved by tobacco's profound relaxant effect on nervous and muscular tissue.

Obstinate constipation or strangulated hernia where a tobacco-smoke enema was used by Eclectic physicians to relax the bowel wall, a practice now abandoned for its danger.

Overview. Nicotiana tabacum is the cultivated tobacco plant, native to tropical America and now grown worldwide, whose dried leaf is the source of nicotine and related pyridine alkaloids. In nineteenth century Eclectic and regular medicine the leaf was used sparingly, chiefly externally or as an enema, for its powerful relaxant and antispasmodic action on smooth and skeletal muscle. It has no established place in contemporary herbal prescribing because of its narrow margin of safety, but its principal alkaloid remains medically important as nicotine replacement therapy for smoking cessation.

Clinical Notes. Historical Eclectic writers valued tobacco as a profound relaxant, reaching for it in tetanus, strangulated hernia, and spasmodic conditions where ordinary antispasmodics failed, typically applying it externally as a fomentation or cautiously as a rectal enema of weak infusion or smoke, never as an internal draught, because the difference between a relaxant dose and a fatal one is small.

Action and Medical Uses. Tobacco ointment forms an anodyne application, useful in various affections of the skin, piles, scald-head, irritable swellings, painful ulcers, etc. Some caution is necessary not to use it too freely, lest it produce its constitutional narcotic effects. An ointment made from the dried leaves is of but little value; one made by rubbing 20 drops of the empyreumatic oil of tobacco with 1 ounce of simple ointment, forms an active preparation.

Specific indications and reasoning. tlesnake, and to have been used with much success. It influences the uervous system directly, and experiment may develop a valuable use for it. It is not in the market, and we will therefore have to depeud upon those who can procure it green, to determine its properties.