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Okay, I'll admit it: I bought a $170 plant book... so I am reading every single word on all 909 pages. The author is a long-term professor of ethnobotany, Dr. Daniel Austin. On page 108/9 he writes about "arisaema" Jack-in-the-Pulpit:
"When I was a professor in Florida, a mother and her young son came to me for "advice" about a science project that the boy was doing. He had apparently independently discovered that juice from the live plants applied to wounds stopped the pain. Since he was still in grade school, it seemed unlikely that he had scoured the old literature and learned that the natives of North America used the sap in the same matter. Regardless, he was doing an experiment that involved getting as many volunteers as possible to prick their fingers with a needle and then apply juice directly from the plants. I, too, became one of his subjects with plants that they had imported from New England. We dutifully cleaned the instruments, drew the blood from the end of my finger with a needle, and then applied the juice. The pain stopped immediately upon contact with the liquid. They told me that each person they had tested had exactly the same reaction.
"Since these plants are no longer common because of habitat loss, I certainly do not recommend having pharmaceutical companies run out and harvest them wholesale to create a new pain-fighting product for the market. However, if you do happen to be near a wild region where the herbs grow, and you wound yourself, keep the young man's experiment in mind. You just might stop the pain before you get back to civilization and apply a more expensive remedy."
Here's the range of the arisaema triphyllum, Jack In The Pulpit:
http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=ARTR
And some info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arisaema_triphyllum
"When I was a professor in Florida, a mother and her young son came to me for "advice" about a science project that the boy was doing. He had apparently independently discovered that juice from the live plants applied to wounds stopped the pain. Since he was still in grade school, it seemed unlikely that he had scoured the old literature and learned that the natives of North America used the sap in the same matter. Regardless, he was doing an experiment that involved getting as many volunteers as possible to prick their fingers with a needle and then apply juice directly from the plants. I, too, became one of his subjects with plants that they had imported from New England. We dutifully cleaned the instruments, drew the blood from the end of my finger with a needle, and then applied the juice. The pain stopped immediately upon contact with the liquid. They told me that each person they had tested had exactly the same reaction.
"Since these plants are no longer common because of habitat loss, I certainly do not recommend having pharmaceutical companies run out and harvest them wholesale to create a new pain-fighting product for the market. However, if you do happen to be near a wild region where the herbs grow, and you wound yourself, keep the young man's experiment in mind. You just might stop the pain before you get back to civilization and apply a more expensive remedy."
Here's the range of the arisaema triphyllum, Jack In The Pulpit:
http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=ARTR
And some info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arisaema_triphyllum
