Action, Medical Uses, and Dosage.—Elm bark is nutritive, expectorant, diuretic, demulcent, and emollient, and is a very valuable remedial agent. In mucous inflammations of the lungs, bowels, stomach, bladder, or kidneys, used freely in the form of a mucilaginous drink (1 ounce of the powdered bark to 1 pint of water), it is highly beneficial, as well as in diarrhoea, dysentery, coughs, pleurisy, strangury, and sore throat, in all of which it tends powerfully to allay the inflammation. A tablespoonful of the powder boiled in a pint of new milk, affords a nourishing diet for infants weaned from the breast, preventing the bowel complaints to which they are subject, and rendering them fat and healthy. Some physicians consider the constant use of it, during and after the seventh month of gestation, as advantageous in facilitating and causing an easy delivery; 1/2 pint of the infusion to be drank daily. Elm bark has likewise been successfully employed externally in cutaneous diseases, especially in obstinate cases of herpetic and syphilitic eruptions, and certainly possesses more efficient virtues than are commonly supposed. As an emollient poultice, the bark has been found very serviceable when applied to inflamed parts, suppurating tumors, fresh wounds, burns, scalds, bruises, and ulcers; and in the excruciating pains of the testes, which accompany the metastasis of mumps, whether of recent or long standing, the constant use of an elm poultice, regularly changed every 4 hours, will be found a superior remedy. Notwithstanding its general value as an application to ulcers, it will often be found injurious, especially when used as a cataplasm to ulcers of the limbs, rendering the ulcer more irritable and difficult to heal, and frequently converting a simple sore, which might be cured by astringent or other washes, into an almost intractable ulcer; much care is, therefore, required in the application of this bark externally. As an injection, the infusion will prove useful in diarrhoea, dysentery, tenesmus, and hemorrhoids, also in gonorrhoea and gleet. The powder, sprinkled on the surface of the body, will prevent and heal excoriations and chafings, and allay the itching and heat of erysipelas. As the bark increases in bulk by imbibing moisture, it has been recommended to form bougies and tents of it for the dilatation of strictures, fistulas, etc., but in urethral strictures it has proved troublesome, from the liability of the part behind the stricture breaking off in the attempt to withdraw it, and passing into the bladder. The infusion of the bark is the common form of administration, and may be drank ad libitum (J. King). (See Mucilago Ulmi.)
