Mapping our Materia Medica, installment 25

Pulsatilla pratensis

A break from Chronic Disease this week, to bring in a seasonal remedy. Pulsatilla pratensis should be blooming through the snow in the high alpine meadows of Central Europe just about now.

Pulsatilla pratensis (previously P. nigricans, P. vulgaris anglica, Anemone pratensis), known as small Pasque flower (as it typically blooms around Easter), is a common flower of the high alpine meadows of Central & Western Europe, found at lower elevations in its northernmost range in southern Scandinavia. It entered the conventional medical formulary of Hahnemann’s day from the Alpine dairying cultures of Central Europe.

Hahnemann first described Pulsatilla in his Fragmenta de viribus medicamentorum: positivis sive in sano corpore humano observatis (Fragmentary Observations relative to the Positive Powers of Medicines on the healthy Human Body), his first collection of toxicologic observations & “provings,” published in 1805, as a tincture of the whole fresh plant. This was one of the medicinal subatances for which Anton von Stoerck, one of Hahnemann’s medical school professors at Vienna, foreshadowed Hahnemann’s reliance on the principle of similars, and the use of “provings” (Prüfungen) on the healthy to ascertain the medicinal properties of substances; Stoerck’s monograph, Libellus De USO Medico Pulsatilla Nigricantis, is available as an Amazon reprint.