Ginseng

Ginseng: what was it used for?

In China, by the account of Father Jartoux that Bigelow reprints, a decoction of about a fifth of an ounce of the root, boiled in a covered vessel with two successive waters: the sick took it to recover health and the healthy to make themselves stronger, and it was held to remove all fatigue of body or mind, cure the lungs, strengthen the stomach, and prolong life. The Chinese physicians, Stuart says, call it a tonic to the five viscera, quieting the animal spirits, establishing the soul, allaying fear, and brightening the eye, and prescribe it in nearly every severe disease: all forms of debility, dyspepsia, old coughs, chronic malaria, and exhausting discharges. In America, Bigelow placed it among the demulcents beside liquorice, and quoted Dr. Fothergill that a decoction had been of service in the tedious chronic coughs of the old; most of it was sold by the druggists as a masticatory, “one of the most innocent articles for this purpose.”

Ginseng: what does modern science say?

A 2013 systematic review found 65 randomised controlled trials of Panax ginseng, most of them on psychomotor or physical performance, and judged that there was no conclusive evidence for its use in any particular disease, though the results for glucose metabolism and the immune response were promising; across 40 trials that recorded adverse events, 135 minor ones and none serious. The Cochrane review of ginseng for cognition found nine placebo-controlled trials, could pool none of them, and concluded there was a lack of convincing evidence of a cognitive effect in healthy people and no high-quality evidence in dementia. For American ginseng, a trial of 290 cancer patients found non-significant trends toward less fatigue at 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams a day and no excess toxicity; and in twenty healthy volunteers two weeks of American ginseng reduced the anticoagulant effect of warfarin.

Ginseng: what did the older authorities say?

Father Jartoux, as Bigelow gives him

The Jesuit at Pekin, travelling the mountains of Tartary under the emperor’s sanction, saw the root gathered by an army of ten thousand Tartars in 1709, each bound to present the emperor two ounces of the best and sell him the rest for its weight in silver. Having taken half a root himself, “he found his pulse quicker and fuller, his appetite improved, and his strength increased so as to bear labour better than before”; and the Tartars often brought him the leaves instead of tea, which he found he preferred to the best tea.

Jacob Bigelow

The Boston physician found the American plant “precisely the same with the Asiatic,” and remarked that the Chinese and the North American Indian names both signify a resemblance to the figure of a man, “though this resemblance, it must be confessed, is rather of a humble kind.” Tried in America and Europe, its virtues did not justify the Chinese estimate: “a whole root may be eaten without inconvenience,” and its place is among the demulcents, nearer liquorice than any other medicine.

The Pen-ts’ao, as G. A. Stuart reports it

With the Chinese “the medicine par excellence; the dernier ressort when all other drugs fail,” reserved for the Emperor and his household and conferred on high officials in a serious breakdown. The best is the wild root of Manchuria, then the Korean; the American sort is thought much inferior. To test a root, two men walk together, one with a piece in his mouth: if after three to five li he is not tired while the other is out of breath, the drug is true.

Mrs. M. Grieve

Sarrasin sent specimens from Canada to Paris in 1704, and in 1718 the Jesuits of Canada began shipping the root to China, the first cargo to Canton yielding enormous profits; by 1748 it sold at a dollar a pound in America and nearly five in China. The Indian collectors gathered it only after the fruit was ripe and bent the stem down before digging the root, to sow its seeds; still it was exterminated in many districts, and Canada fined collecting between January and September. Not an official medicine, but a place in the eclectic Materia Medica.