DIGITALIS PURPUREA

DIGITALIS PURPUREA

Digitalis purpurea Linn, botanical name

FAMILY—Scrophulariaceae

COMMON NAMES: Fairy fingers, Common foxglove, Purple foxglove, and English foxglove.

A biennial herb that can grow up to 2 m tall, it bears a rosette of radical rugose, somewhat downy leaves in the first year, and in the second year, a single, upright flowering axis with sessile and subsessile leaves that ends in a one-sided raceme emerges from the center of the leaf rosette. The flowers are tubular and purple in color.

DISTRIBUTION: Grown in Norway, England, England’s southern and central European regions, and India.

Second-year growth leaves are the part that is used.

HOMOEOPATHIC USES

HEART FAILURE: A heart remedy. Digitalis stimulates heart muscles, increases force of systole. Heart failure with irregular heart beat. Sensation as if heart would stop beating if moved. Weak heart. The least movement causes violent palpitations. Frequent stitches in heart. Pulse full, irregular, very slow, and weak.

JAUNDICE: Heart problems are often present along with jaundice. Other symptoms of jaundice include an enlarged, painful, and sore liver, a slow, irregular heartbeat, high-colored, scant urine, and white, chalky, ashy, or pasty stool.

Cardiac dropsy, scanty, dark, albuminous urine, and an unsteady, weak heart that seemed to be waiting for a chance to inhale deeply.

Chronic bronchitis is characterized by heart disease, coughing up blood occasionally, expectoration that tastes sweet, a constant need to breathe deeply, and a raw, sore feeling in the chest.

Urine is dark, hot, burning, with sharp cutting or throbbing pain at the neck of the bladder, as if a straw were being thrust back and forth; this pain is worse at night; there is brick-dust sediment in the urine. URETHRITIS: Continued urging, but urine passes in drops.

RHEUMATISM: Rheumatic pain in the joints, white, glistening swelling of the joints, nocturnal swelling of the joints, sensation of a red-hot wire darting through them, swelling of the feet, and rheumatism associated with heart disease.

POTENCY : Mother tincture, 3, 30