Bloodroot

Bloodroot: what was it used for?

The Pillager Ojibwe, Smith records, squeezed the orange juice onto a lump of maple sugar and held it in the mouth until it melted, for sore throat; the Forest Potawatomi did the same for mild sore throats and steeped the root for diphtheria; both painted their faces with it for the medicine lodge and for clan marks, and used it alone or in combinations for a dark yellow or orange dye. Bigelow found it an acrid narcotic: eight to twenty grains of the fresh powdered root irritated the throat, brought on heartburn, nausea, faintness, and vertigo, and at last vomited; in smaller repeated doses it slowed the pulse like digitalis, and Professors Smith and Ives gave it in incipient consumption and typhoid pneumonia, Smith also curing soft polypi with the powder. Rafinesque had it as the base of Rawson’s bitters and a prophylactic against marsh fevers. Densmore: expectorant in small doses, nauseant and emetic in large, in the ninth United States Pharmacopoeia.

Bloodroot: what does modern science say?

The root’s benzophenanthridine and protopine alkaloids, sanguinarine first among them, have never become medicines; a 2016 review found them instead associated with toxicities “ranging from mouthwash induced leukoplakia to cancer salve necrosis and treatment failure,” and suggested that the natural variation in the alkaloids explains the inconsistent results. Sanguinarine, the active ingredient of the black salves still sold for skin cancers, intercalates DNA, generates oxidative stress, and has given contradictory genotoxicity results; mouthwashes containing it have been linked to oral leukoplakia, and a 2017 review judged the question of its carcinogenicity of urgent clinical relevance because patients keep applying the salve to sun-damaged and cancerous skin.

Bloodroot: what did the older authorities say?

Jacob Bigelow

“Among the earliest visiters of spring the botanist will find in almost any part of the United States the Sanguinaria Canadensis.” Its medical properties “are those of an acrid narcotic”; a large dose irritates the fauces, occasions heartburn, nausea, faintness, vertigo, and diminished vision, and at length vomits. Papers dipped in the tincture take a bright salmon colour, but the aqueous infusion dyes faintly, “an impediment to the use of this article in dyeing.”

Huron H. Smith

“The Pillager Ojibwe use the orange-red juice of the Bloodroot to cure sore throat. The juice is squeezed out on a lump of maple sugar, and this is retained in the mouth until it has melted away. They also use the juice to paint the face for the medicine lodge ceremony or when on the warpath.” In dyeing it needs no mordant and gives a dark yellow or orange.

Charles F. Millspaugh

“The most beautiful harbinger of its season,” used for many years by the aborigines to paint their faces, clothing, and implements of war, and by the laity as a domestic remedy in gastric troubles with podophyllum. In toxic doses it causes burning of every mucous membrane it touches, faintness, and insensibility; “death has occurred from overdoses,” after violent vomiting, terrible thirst, dilated pupils, and the coldness that shows the heart failing.

Mrs. M. Grieve

Emetic, cathartic, expectorant, and emmenagogue; chiefly used as an expectorant in chronic bronchitis and locally in chronic eczema, “applied to fungoid growths, ulcers fleshy excrescences, cancerous affections and as an escharotic.” The root is collected in the autumn after the leaves die down, and the powder causes sneezing.