Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus: what was it used for?

An antiseptic oil, above all. Grieve calls the medicinal oil “probably the most powerful antiseptic of its class, especially when it is old,” used as a stimulant and antiseptic gargle, inhaled for asthma, diphtheria, and sore throat, applied freely to the skin in croup, and given in drachm doses in tuberculosis and bronchitis. The trees themselves were planted against malaria: the botanist von Müller first suggested their scented leaves might disinfect fever districts, and in Algeria, Grieve says, a marshy, unhealthy district was made one of the healthiest within five years of planting, chiefly by the drying action of the roots.

Eucalyptus: what does modern science say?

The European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee accepts the oil as a traditional herbal medicine, “exclusively based upon long-standing use,” for the relief of cough associated with a cold and, rubbed on, for localised muscle pain (monograph of 2024), and the leaf for cough associated with a cold (monograph of 2013). The oil’s chief constituent is 1,8-cineole, also called eucalyptol, given in the leaf report as 54 to 95 per cent of the oil. A 2022 meta-analysis of trials for cough found eucalyptus products safe, but their efficacy “minimal and of uncertain clinical importance.”

Eucalyptus: what did the older authorities say?

King’s American Dispensatory

“The Eucalyptus trees are very numerous in their native country, and constitute an important feature in every landscape.” Most of them exude a resinous substance, “and hence are known to the Australian colonists as ‘gum trees,’” and their leaves, opposite and flat in the young tree, turn their edges to the ground in the old, “thus giving the Eucalyptus a strange appearance.”