Medicinal plants that act on the heart
The medicinal plants discussed so far were those that have the most striking effects on the nervous system. Let us now consider those domestic herbs which affect primarily the heart and circulation, and which are therefore chiefly used to cure fixed (chronic) heart trouble or to relieve its symptoms. Before I proceed to a detailed discussion of these, it will not be superfluous, for the sake of clarity, to say a few words about the heart and circulation in general, and about circulatory disturbances in chronic heart trouble. The heart is a rhythmic muscle, working in regular alternation, which expels blood at each contraction (systole), and then fills up and relaxes at the next relaxation (diastole), to gain strength for the next systole. It does a great deal of work, which consists partly in contracting the blood mass expelled and giving it a certain velocity, and partly in overcoming the resistance offered by the contents of the arteries branching throughout the body. This resistance is very great, so that even when the body is at rest, the heart (counting seventy beats per minute, or systoles) does 77 metric kilograms of work in one minute, or 462 metric kilograms in one hour, or 11,000 metric kilograms of work in one day, rounded down to the nearest round number. If I were to convert this to a whole human lifetime and determine how much work the heart of a 70-year-old man (or a nervous lady), for example, has done in the course of his or her life, the sum would be so enormous that I, who have always been a little averse to mathematics, would not dare to think about it. Yet this is even the most moderate calculation, because if one also does more muscular work, the work of the heart can be five times as much and even more, that is, 50,000 kilograms a day and even more, and it is not even necessary to do any exhausting muscular work, because all the other functions of the body, the function of the glands, the digestive processes, every good lunch and dinner multiplies the work of the most faithful and most unpretentious servant of the body, the heart. To what extent this work is intensified during the wrestling or long-distance running of athletes, not to mention the exhausting (summer) marches of soldiers, is easy to imagine. Proof of this is that the champions of heavy athletics, provided they do not stop excessive exercise in time, rarely live to a ripe old age; and after the great military marches, it is often observed that the poorfoot-soldiers(as the old Hungarians called the foot-soldier) develop in a few hours an acute cardiac congestion, the bull’s heart (the French coeur de taureauya; cor taurinum), as do the over-trained racehorses. Fixed (chronic) heart disease is most often caused by valvularinsufficiency, a condition in which one of the valves fails to close completely due to any abnormal cause. When this happens, part of the blood flows back into the section of the heart from which it has just been ejected. The blood flow becomes congested and the heart can only overcome this by increased work. The result of this increased effort, repeated at every contraction, is that the heart muscle becomes overstretched and overdeveloped, just as the biceps muscle becomes overdeveloped if it is forced to exert more force every day. In the early stages of heart disease, the overworked (hypertrophied) heart can usually overcome the obstacles of congestion and stasis quite successfully; the heart is usually still hard-working enough to convince the body to supply blood and to eliminate congestion. This stage in the development of heart trouble is called the stage of compensation. However, after some time, the heart becomes exhausted, the circulatory disturbances increase, the arteries (veins) become overflowed with blood due to congestion, the arteries are not sufficiently saturated and the general congestion of the blood, hydrops, becomes a consequence. This sad state of insufficient cardiac output is called the stage of incompensation. In the more advanced stages of heart disease, the symptoms of incompetence are usually obvious: the face of the patient, due to the saturation with insufficiently oxidized venous blood, is bluish (cyanotic) in colour, but usually paler; blood whey accumulates in the subcutaneous connective tissue, especially in organs distant from the heart, where the circulation is slower, e.g. (hydrops anasarca – skin dropsy, or as the old Hungarian physicians used to say, in a somewhat long but pathologically very typical way, “watery dropsy running down the skin”, there is also more or less marked dyspnoea, which later increases the patients’ already unfortunate condition into an embarrassing suffering. This asthmatic dyspnoea is later aggravated by the fact that the blood pressure also causes the alveoli to become constricted and, in most cases, bronchitis develops in the lungs. There is, of course, no question of a thorough and definitive cure for chronic heart disease caused by valve insufficiency, because a new and better valve cannot be made to replace the abnormally damaged one. The doctor can only alleviate the patient’s individual suffering bykeepingthe heart aslong as possiblein the compensatory stage and by postponing as far as possible the period when the increasing heart failure is “non datur medicamen in hortis”. There are lucky patients for whom the stage of incompensation lasts for a long time, sometimes decades or even a lifetime, and if they can avoid the mental and spiritual stresses of everyday life, the struggles of making a living, or certain serious physical exertions (such as childbirth), they can make their not exactly carefree existence on earth quite bearable. Whether or not the constituents of a medicinal plant have a medically useful effect on the heart is usually determined by experiments on the hearts of cold-blooded or warm-blooded animals. In cold-blooded animals, such as the frog, the heart is very hardy, beating for hours after removal from the animal’s body; (the same can be done in the hearts of mammals by keeping them alive by injecting suitable nutritive solutions into the corpuscular vessels). The sternum of a frog is cut open, the tip of its heart is pinched into a suitable hook, which is connected to the shorter arm of a writing implement that moves like a jack. The other end of the same arm makes a mark at each contraction of the heart on the surface of a piece of cardboard covering the surface of a drum (the cylinder of the kymo-graphion ) which moves about a vertical axis. Other apparatus are used for more exact examinations, of which I will mention here only the Williams’apparatus; this is much more perfect than the former, because it forms a complete blood circulation, which returns to itself, and by raising the reservoirs connected with it, or by tightening the pins, the work of the heart may be increased; and by the Williams’ apparatus, modified by Dreser, the absolute force of the heart and the volume of its impulses may be determined. Plants acting on the heart:
- Foxglove, Digitalis purpurea
- Lily of the valley (poisonous), Convallaria majalis
- Four-leaved candelabra (poisonous), Paris quadrifolia
- Honeysuckle (poisonous), Green and Black Honeysuckle , Helleborus
- Lily of the valley (poisonous), Ornithogalum
- White daffodil (poisonous), Narcissus poeticus
- Yellow daffodil (poisonous), N.pseudonarciussus
- Summer Peat (poisonous), Leucojum aestivum
- Snowdrop (poisonous), Galanthus nivalis
- Emperor’s crown (poisonous), Fritillaria imperialis
- Vernal hellebore, Adonis vernalis
- Summer herb, Adonis aestivalis
- Broomcorn, Spartium scoparium
- Spotted coronilla, Coronilla varia
- Goatsfoot, Evonymus europaeus
- Leander (poisonous), Nerium oleander
- Fly agaric (poisonous), Amanita muscaria (Szekler “Fly agaric”)
- Siberian fly agaric (poisonous), Muchomor