Abstract
MANY drugs used by North American Indians are known to have been incorporated into therapeutics as practised by the physicians of frontier America. One result of this was the number of native plant drugs which appeared in the nineteenth century editions of the U.S. Pharmacopeia. Our interest in the chemistry and pharmacology of natural products and in the investigation of the efficacy of these, mostly discarded, plant remedies has directed our attention to the genus Viburnum. Several species have been mentioned repeatedly as uterine relaxants and general antispasmodics. Those most commonly cited are V. opulus (Cramp Bark) and V. prunifolium (Black Haw) which are still listed in the United States Dispensatory1. These varieties have also been the subject of some attempts at fractionation2–14, but there has been much controversy about the real effects of drugs prepared from these plants. For a number of reasons15, it is currently thought that no evidence exists which confirms their reputed biological activity.
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JARBOE, C., SCHMIDT, C., NICHOLSON, J. et al. Uterine Relaxant Properties of Viburnum. Nature 212, 837 (1966). https://doi.org/10.1038/212837a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/212837a0
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