Julie Gardener
New Member
Cannabis Indica
By G. C. Wallich, M.D., Surgeon –Major, Retired List.Br Med J. 1883 June 23; 1(1173): 1224.
The following facts, through bearing but indirectly upon those special medical uses of Indian hemp to which attention has been drawn in recent issues of the British Medical Journal, may serve in some measure to explain the conflicting estimates that have been formed of the general value of the drug by different observers.
My knowledge of Indian hemp as a therapeutic agent dates from the year 1838, when its properties were communicated to me in Calcutta by my friend Dr. W.B. O’shaughnessy; and, at his request, I made the sketch of the plant which is appended to his earliest memoir on the subject. During my subsequent serived in India, I had many opportunities of testing the efficiency of Indian hemp in cases of cholera, tetanus, hydrophobia, and various minor disorders. But, though fully convinced of its value, like many other medical men, I soon became aware that the action of the drug was singularly uncertain, and that doses which in one locality produced a given effect in another. Eventually it became manifest that this uncertain action was due to inherent differences in the composition of the resinous extract of the plant, incident on its being grown either in the plains or in the hill-districts of India. The drug had not, at this period, been supplied on indent to military hospitals at the distance from the Presidency: and those who want to employ it experimentally in their practice were, therefore, obliged to procure it for themselves from the native drug-dealers, either, in the form of the crude dried plant or of the inspissated extract, which went by the native name of ‘churrus’.
The fact which came to light was that the therapeutic efficacy of the plant growth in the plains is very markedly inferior to that of the plant when produced in the hill-districts. I had no means at my command of ascertaining the particular conditions of soil, temperature, and mode of culture and preparation, upon which this superiority of the hill-plant is dependent; but it is now quite impossible to doubt that the conditions are of an analogous kind to those which in a major degree, cause the same species of cannabis to produce a highly energetic medicinal ingredient in tropical and subtropical countries, whilst they exercise no such effect upon it when grown in our own temperate latitudes.
The fact of the superiority of the extract and mixture prepared from the hill-grown plant was, however, suggested to my mind by what had been communicated to me in the years 1841 and 1842 by Dr. W.L. MacGregor, at Kurnal, a station then notorious for its extreme unhealthiness, and visited, at the period referred to, by consecutive outbreaks of cholera in its worst form, acute dysentery, and enteric fever.
Dr. MacGregor claimed to have successfully treated the two first-named of these formidable diseases by such enormous doses of ‘hill-opium’ and croton-oil combined, that, had I not myself witnessed the results, I should have hesitated to vouch for their authenticity. Fortunately, those who would like to see a formal record of my friend’s practice will find it in his work “On the Principal Diseases affecting European and Native Soldiers in the North-Western Provincese of India”, by Surgeon W. L. MacGregor, M.D., published in Calcutta in 1843. Meanwhile, it may interest the readers of the Journal to learn that it was not unusual with him to give as much as ‘fifteen drops of croton-oil in the course of twenty minutes, or nineteen drachms of laudanum in the same number of successive hours, the doses of croton-oil being occasionally increased to twenty drops’, without causing any untoward consequences whatever. Dr. MacGregor further states that ‘the smallest dose of opium given whilst in cholera it was given to a much greater extent.’
On the merits or demerits of this practice I have no desire to express any opinion; but of this fact I still entertain a vivid recollection (and what I state can easily be confirmed by other medical officers who were stationed at Kurnal in the years named), that many cases did unquestionably survive and recover, if they did not actually owe their recovery to this supremely heroic treatment. Under any circumstances, it must, I think, tend to convince all who give the matter their serious thought, that there is even yet a good deal to be learned concerning the action of some of the most powerful known drugs upon the human organism, when it is already under the fierce spell of some form of blood-poisoning.
Source: Br Med J. 1883 June 23; 1(1173): 1224.
