Sassafras as healer. Itch, mange, cracked heels. Treatments. Newspaper 1885

Red sassafras, fall. Metacomet.

Sassafras as a healer?  You have an itch?  Your horse has an itch? Fret not, gentle reader.  Your condition has been noted and its happy resolution is freely provided in this small column:  Springfield Globe-Republic, 11/20/1885 Springfield, OH (Image 2).  Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Tap the plus to render the teeny invisible visible.

Summations: Veterinary and humanitary. Veterinary: pertaining to beasts of burden, see etymonline,  Veteran: old enough to bear burden?

The Itch.   As to a horse, change the diet and sponge the horse daily with one ounce of the following:  "a weak dye of saleratus water" to which has been added equal parts of sassafras and sulphur. Cover the parts to which the solution has  been applied with linen, not flannel.

Mange.  Mange in man is generally denominated Itch instead.  This is a contagious condition, so isolation is recommended.  For an animal topical treatment, sponge with lime water. Mix and shake well the following:  4 oz. pyrolygneous acid, 1 oz. spirits of turpentine,  3 oz. linseed oil, 1 oz. sulphur.

As a medicine for the horse, rub the following in a mortar:   2 oz. sulphur, 2 oz. cream of tartar, 2 oz. sassafras, 2 oz. powdered mandrake.  Divide the result into 12 equal parts, and mix one part with fodder for the morning feed, and one part with the fodder for the evening feed. Also, make "some change" in the feed, and avoid musty grain and ground meal.

Q.  Is the reference to sassafras for a tea, as from peeled, tender roots? Or a powder of some other part?  We await.

Ecstasy, MDMA, Sassafras and Help: for autism, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, other?

Sassafras takes on autism, anxiety, how about PTSD?

Who will test that?

PTSD and Sassafras.  A hopeful possibility for aid?

Sassafras, fall green turning red, Metacomet, Reservoir, CT

Coming full circle from the ban on sassafras based on allelopathic rodent responses (humans are not allelopathic as to sassafras, so why use rodents for us?), it now appears that medical benefits from sassafras could outweigh earlier imprudent restrictions on use of elements of sassafras. See http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/12/17/drug-%E2%80%98ecstasy%E2%80%99-may-help-individuals-with-schizophrenia-autism/21876.html/  Long used as a hospitality beverage -- loosening everyone up -- good uses were known and promulgated back in 1983, for example, see http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/sassafras-uses-herbal-medicine-zmaz83jazshe.aspx/.  Farther back, starting at least in 1603, hunting the sassafras to bring back the roots was profitable and healthful, see http://sites.google.com/site/atimelineofamerica/1603/  Sir Walter Raleigh had been given rights to develop the possibilties by Elizabeth I, see site.  Alas, add, in 1997, the book Food Safety and Toxicity, edited by John DeVries, the unexamined claim of carcinogenic safrole and the use of mice to conclude that, at page 128. 
Call for more testing, without rodents, please, Mr. DeVries.

Add to the list of conditions to be tested with sassafras:  PTSD.  Is the safrole in sassafras as dire as publicized?  Not necessarily, see http://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=218174/  Is it more likely that the rampant natural availability of sassafras, read: not profit producing if you can raise it in your yard -- and the industries who like labs instead, are at work?

Any overload use can be addressed as we do with alcohol, sudafed, other matters where reasonable restrictions on purchases apply.  PTSD:  The Evil Hours, by David J. Morris, this review by Jen Percy, does not address use of sassafras, to my recollection.  To be checked.

Wax poetic.  Enjoy http://hellopoetry.com/words/19353/sassafras/poems/

The sassafras came back. Gallery of red and yellow sassafras. Life resumes after the logging.

    A gallery of fall 'fras

Red and Yellow Sassafras At the Metacomet.

Sassafras up close. Metacomet.

Sassafras is most easily spotted in the fall.

Red sassafras at the Metacomet.

Sassafras lovers, rejoice.  The loggers did their thinning and clear-cutting, and the sassafras came back. We were assured that the trucks and mess (some still there) were for the woods' own good at our local high reservoir trail, and for two years some of us grieved.  Now, come and enjoy.  I understand that the red sassafras is more fragrant than the yellow, but have not noticed that yet.  Perhaps in the spring.

Metacomet trail, segment at Reservoir 6.

The trail here, overall is named for the chief Metacomet, sachem or chief of the Wampanoag tribe, who featured in King Philip's War, see http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/battleswars16011800/p/King-Philips-War-1675-1676.htm

Red sassafras, Reservoir 6, West Hartford CT

Yellow sassafras, Reservoir 6, West Hartford CT

Red and yellow sassafras, Metacomet

The Metacomet is part of an old Indian trail  see http://newenglandtrail.org/get-on-the-trail/ct-net-section-17-metacomet-trail.  The trail system now extends some 215 miles.  See http://amcberkshire.org/netmm/

qq

This site is not alone in bewailing the stupid stuff done in banning sassafras.  See http://www.eattheweeds.com/sassafras-root-beer-rat-killer/  You can still make your own rootbeer, see https://byo.com/stories/issue/item/563-down-to-the-root-make-your-own-root-beer/  Meanwhile, write your congresspeople who, themselves, clearly, need this as the national governing drink. 

Some sassafras grows tall.

For tall, single trunk sassafras, prune out the shoots.

Oxytocin effect in sassafras? Why not let nature's inexpensive source help people feel good, meet pain sensibly, meet many needs?

Sassafras. Hospitality tea. Steep peeled, tender roots. Here, on the Metacomet, in fall.

Suddenly a search for oxytocin in sassafras, simple enough, turns up site after site.  Would a benign chemist please stand up and assess in an objective way whether this is so, and whether someone should start the process for reassessing the ban on sassafras.  Like marijuana, sassafras is nature itself.  Safeguards can be put in place to see that underage or other vulnerables have extremely restricted access to it.  Is sassafras so much worse, more of a threat (to whom?) that it is given prohibition. And based (check this as well) on flawed research that used its effect on rodents as the measure of ill effects on humans, when the rodents and sassafras are in an allelopathic relationship.  Sassafras defends itself by being not benign as to rodents, beavers who eat it, and the like.

Does sensible caution in use of any substance have to mean  prohibition, after flawed testing in particular, so this "hospitality tea" as used for centuries by indigenous peoples, is unavailable to adults? To feel good, or a small  buzz (or to abuse), we already have alcohol, but alcohol that takes lots of processing and is expensive.  Instead, publicize sassafras tea, other uses.

Do your own search.  Oxytocin and sassafras, oxytocin in sassafras, you pick.  I only make a hobby of spotting it in public places. 

As a sassafras-spotter, I am happy to announce that the logging at our local reservoir, up the ridge here, did not eradicate the sassafras.  Shoots, small understory, coming up -- both the yellow, which here is common; and the red, that is more rare.  Is the yellow or red, the color of the leaves turning in autumn, a function of exposure to sunlight?  Or are they different sorts.  Taking pictures as we speak.

Peyote, sassafras, marijuana, some help in feeling good in a politically toxic world, go back to nature.  This is an area, where the only competition is the rich and corrupted drug companies, where natural use of natural substances should be left to the people.  Advertise not the fancy drugs, but how to use nature, wisely.

We have been educated never to eat wild mushrooms.  Pretty, aren't they? But possibly toxic. We can educate about sassafras.

Metacomet. Mushrooms. What kind?

Loggers v Sassafras. Sassafras Wins

Forestry revenge.  Or clearing the way for fruitfulness?

At our sassafras walk, some 3 1/2-4 miles around a ridge-top reservoir, woods and dikes and bogs,  the loggers came through. They had permission of the forestry-district commission authorities, but there was devastation nonetheless. Does clear-cutting serve the long term health of a woods walk? Perhaps. Watchful waiting needed. Cautious optimism.

Meanwhile, experience with me the sadness at groves of sassafras apparently mindlessly mowed down and uprooted out. Do public utilities (our MDC at the reservoir) and loggers have any sense of differentiation between plants? Will the trillium survive?

As to the trillium, doubtful. Perhaps the sassafras can survive, with its millennia of experience under stress.  Underground runners, rev your engines.

 Sadness. Watchfully wait.

Sassafras groves, clear cut. MDC, CT.

 

 

Some sprigs survived.  

Sassafras: Some patches survive the clear-cut, MDC, CT

 

 

Can one or two survivor sassafras root another thriving grove.

Sassafras, perhaps a long-term-survivor MDC CT

Update.  The prospects for our few clumps of sassafras look okay, several months after the forestry management.  Some sassafras that had been in groves, are peeking up yet again. 

Sassafras regeneration. For the species that survived Hiroshima, this is not surviving.  Forestry is not atomic bombs.  Underground runners:  whether the tactic relates to plants, or to heretics, or other dissenters, does nature say this:  if under stress, go underground if needed, wait, nurture yourself as you can, poke up a cautious head later, and see if you can survive despite them.

So far, for the MDC in CT, signs show that sassafras will rise again. 

Will exploration of its healing qualities, its attribute of enhancing insect repellence (read, bedbugs) and then congeniality, fellowship, someday outweigh the element of ecstasy that some can use to their own uses.  Perhaps.  What to control, and how, and why make sassafras a demon under the false flag of "carcinogenic" when the testing for that was intrinsically flawed.