Pelargonium

Pelargonium: what was it used for?

A root for the chest. In southern Africa, by the account of the European Medicines Agency’s assessment report, infusions of the roots of both species were used for coughs, chest problems including tuberculosis, and disorders of the gut such as diarrhoea and dysentery, and were claimed to cure disorders of the liver and painful menstruation, while the aerial parts served to heal wounds.

Pelargonium: what does modern science say?

The European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee accepts the root as a traditional herbal medicine, “exclusively based upon long-standing use,” for the symptomatic treatment of the common cold (monograph of 2024). Its assessment report finds the roots rich in oligomeric and polymeric proanthocyanidins, with simple coumarins characteristic of the genus, and names glucogallin, catechin, and umckalin among the major constituents of an aqueous root extract. A Cochrane review of 2013 found that a liquid preparation relieved most outcomes of acute bronchitis in adults (three trials, 746 patients) but tablets did not, with similar results in children (three trials, 819); it judged that the extract may relieve the symptoms of acute rhinosinusitis and the common cold in adults, “but doubt exists,” and rated the evidence low for bronchitis and very low for sinusitis and the common cold. Adverse events were more common with the extract, but none were serious.

Pelargonium: what did the older authorities say?

The European Medicines Agency’s assessment report (2024), after Helmstädter

The Englishman Charles Henry Stevens went to South Africa in 1897 on his doctor’s advice to cure his tuberculosis, was treated there by a Zulu medicine man with a boiled root preparation, and three months later considered himself cured. Back in Britain he set up a company to sell the remedy as “Stevens’ Consumption Cure.” From 1920 the French-Swiss physician A. Sechehaye treated tuberculosis patients with it, documenting around 800 over nine years. The source of the root stayed unidentified until 1977, when Bladt and Wagner at the University of Munich showed that it came from Pelargonium sidoides and/or P. reniforme.

British Medical Association, Secret Remedies (1909)

The Association treated Stevens’ Consumption Cure as a quack medicine sold by a series of letters to sufferers. It quoted his circular to doctors announcing that the secret formula was now revealed as umckaloabo root and chijitse, and answered: “The farce of revealing a formula by the employment of such fancy names as these is one of the oldest dodges of the quack medicine man.” Enquiries in South Africa, including one by the Native Affairs Department of Cape Colony in the Transkeian territories, could find no one who knew the names: “The result of the inquiry was entirely negative.”