Natural order – Gramineae. Common name – Oat. Habitat – Cultivated in all temperate climates. Preparation – Tincture from the fresh seed.
GENERAL ANALYSIS AND THERAPEUTICS.
Acts directly upon the brain and through it affects the functions of nutrition, primarily increasing nerve force and stimulating the nutrition of the whole system. Its action is prompt and usually more permanent than that of other active stimulants. It is ordinarily used in material doses (two or thirty drops of the tincture) for the purpose of obtaining its primary effects when the nerve forces are exhausted. Nervous exhaustion in brain workers (brain fag), or from worry and anxiety. In such cases and in sexual neurasthenia its effects are sometimes marvellous. The latter may be due to excessive sexual indulgence or to onanism. Impotence following long continued sexual excesses. It has proved of great value in alcoholics who are nervous and sleepless and seem to be on the verge of delirium tremens, and it is one of the most important of the various remedies used in the treatment of alcoholism. It is especially useful in the treatment of the morphine and opium habit, and to a less extent that of tobacco. It will often prove palliative in paralysis agitans and chorea, and in the wasting diseases of the aged.
Compare Agnus c., Coni., Phosphorus, Nux vomica, Phosphorus acid, Gelsemium, Picric acid.
ALLEN CORSON COWPERTHWAITE was born at Cape May, New Jersey, May 3, 1848, son of Joseph C. and Deborah (Godfrey) Cowperthwaite. He attended medical lectures at the University of Iowa in 1867-1868, and was graduated from the Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia in 1869. He practiced his profession first in Illinois, and then in Nebraska. In 1877 he became Dean and Professor of Materia Medica in the recently organized Homeopathic Department of the State University of Iowa, holding the position till 1892. In 1884 he accepted the chair of Materia Medica, Pharmacology, and Clinical Medicine in the Homeopathic Medical College of the University of Michigan. He removed to Chicago in 1892, and became Professor of Materia Medica and Therapeutics in the Chicago Homeopathic Medical College. From 1901 he also served as president of that College. He is the author of various works, notably "Insanity in its Medico-Legal Relations" (1876), "A Textbook of Materia Medica and Therapeutics" (1880), of "Gynecology" (1888), and of "The Practice of Medicine " (1901).