Word: serpentina
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...makes his literary debut with a collection of 10 stories as tightly constructed as bejeweled Indian snuffboxes, all odd springs and curious kinks. Nearly every one is pungent with the "damp hessian, methylated spirits and freshly planed deal" of Bombay in the '40s, and colorful families "big in rawolfia serpentina and chinchona bark"; the protagonists are mystics, madmen and hermaphrodites. And nearly all describe episodes of heat and lust, watched through homemade cracks by randy teenage boys. Inside the cunning boxes lie spicy sweetmeats...
...constrict and raise blood pressure. Others, like hydralazine, are relaxers that seem to act directly on the muscle walls of the blood vessels, causing them to dilate and thus decrease pressure. Still others, such as guaneth-idine and reserpine-a drug extracted and purified from the Indian plant Rauwolfia serpentina-achieve the same effect by reducing the action of norepinephrine, the body chemical that causes blood vessels to constrict. Another class of drugs has proved equally useful. Diuretics decrease the kidneys' retention of salt. This in turn decreases the amount of fluid retained by the body. The volume...
...over-50 age group have some degree of hypertension, and hundreds of thousands of them are being medically treated for the condition. Most of these patients take a small daily dose of reserpine or a related alkaloid, both extracted from the roots of the Indian shrub, Rauwolfia serpentina. The rauwolfia products have been in use for 20 years, have generally been well tolerated in the dosage used by patients, and are inexpensive compared with newer medications for lowering blood pressure, such as guanethidine and methyldopa. The Boston team listed six products containing reserpine, usually in combination with a diuretic medication...
Rauwolfia serpentina root...
...Snakeroot. The new drugs are as important, in their way, as the germ-killing sulfas discovered in the 1930s. Two drugs ushered in the new era: chlorpromazine* (TIME, June 14), a synthetic compound, and reserpine †(TIME, June 21), a pure alkaloid from the juices of the snakeroot (Rauwolfia serpentina), crude extracts of which had been used for centuries by medicine men in India. Both drugs became available in the U.S. in 1953. But most ivory-tower mental hospitals, attached to medical schools with good research facilities, passed up the chance to be first to try the drugs. Far more...