Chokecherry

Chokecherry: what was it used for?

The bark, bitter and astringent, with that of the wild black cherry as a tonic, febrifuge, and sedative, ten to forty grains of the powder in infusion or tincture, never boiled; the astringent fruit with cider in domestic medicine; the fruit itself a staple food of the northern Indians and sold by the quantity in the markets of Canadian cities.

Chokecherry: what does modern science say?

The bark, Rafinesque knew, holds prussic acid, and the leaves poison cattle. Goats fed ground chokecherry leaves and flowers for four weeks, at a dose reckoned as 2.5 milligrams of hydrogen cyanide per kilogram a day, showed clinical signs in two of them, vacuoles in the thyroid laid to thiocyanate, and lesions of the midbrain laid to cyanide. The fruit is rich in phenolics and in the anthocyanin kuromanin, which freezing preserves and hot-air drying wastes; and among eighty-five Indigenous remedies of the Canadian Prairies tested against MRSA, the chokecherry extract was active only under conditions imitating a wound.

Chokecherry: what did the older authorities say?

C. S. Rafinesque

Counts Prunus virginiana with the black cherries as active medicine: the bark bitter and astringent, holding prussic acid, tannin, gum, and mucus; tonic, febrifuge, and sedative, very useful in fevers, agues, hectic fever, dyspepsia, and chronic asthma; ten to forty grains of the powder, in infusion or tincture, heat driving off the prussic acid; the bark of the root stronger; it brings the pulse from 75 to 50, and in large doses is narcotic. “Leaves poison cattle, berries intoxicate birds, used for cherry bounce, baneful: kernels equal to bitter almonds.”

King’s American Dispensatory

Explains that the wild cherry of the pharmacopoeia, Prunus serotina, “was long confused with and went by the name of Prunus virginiana, which properly belongs to the Choke cherry”; describes the chokecherry as a shrub of six to ten feet, common in the United States and Canada and, by Sargent’s reckoning, “the most widely distributed of any American species of tree,” its fruit “bitterish, and exceedingly astringent” and often employed with cider in domestic medicine; and dismisses the “concentration” called prunin or cerasin, made from both cherries, as an inefficient agent seldom used.

Charles Sprague Sargent

Describes it in the Silva as the most widely distributed North American tree, growing within the arctic circle and from Labrador across to the Pacific and south to Georgia, Texas, and northern Mexico; its fruit austere and astringent in early autumn, but sweet and edible later; gathered in Canada in great quantities, sold in the markets of the large cities, eaten by the French Canadians, and formerly an important food of the northern Indians. A handsome plant in flower, “but it is generally disfigured by the Black Knot, which makes it a dangerous neighbor to orchards of cultivated Plum-trees.”

William Wood

In New England’s Prospect, as Sargent quotes him: the cherry trees “yeeld great store of Cherries, which grow on clusters like grapes; they be much smaller than our English Cherrie, nothing neare so good if they be not very ripe; they so furre the mouth that the tongue will cleave to the roofe, and the throate wax horse with swallowing those red Bullies (as I may call them), being little better in taste. English ordering may bring them to be an English Cherrie, but yet they are as wilde as the Indians.”