History and Description.—This well-known palm is plentiful along the Atlantic shores, from Florida to South Carolina, where it forms the "palmetto scrub" of the coast. Parts of the plant have been employed in various economic ways, such as the thatching of huts, making of mattresses, straw hats, and paper. The fruit, though sweet and edible, is not regarded as particularly palatable. It is the medicinal part. Animals show a partiality for it, and are said to become fat and sleek when feeding upon the berries. (For an extended description, see monograph on Saw Palmetto, by the late Dr. Edwin M. Hale, of Chicago.) The dried fruit is a 1-seeded, blackish-brown drupe, of an ovoid-oblong form, from ½ to 1 inch long, and about ¼ to ½ inch broad. The exterior has a few wrinkles, with rather large, smooth, flat areas. A single panicle may yield from 6 to 8 pounds of the berries.
Action, Medical Uses, and Dosage.—Saw palmetto appears, from clinical reports, to be a nutritive tonic. It is also an expectorant, and controls irritation of mucous tissues. It has proved useful in irritative cough, chronic bronchial coughs, whooping-cough, laryngitis, acute and chronic, acute catarrh, asthma, tubercular laryngitis, and in the cough of phthisis pulmonalis. Upon the digestive organs it acts kindly, improving the appetite, digestion, and assimilation. However, its most pronounced effects appear to be those exerted upon the urino-genital tracts of both male and female, and upon all the organs concerned in reproduction. It is said to enlarge wasted organs, as the breasts, ovaries, and testicles, while the paradoxical claim is also made that it reduces hypertrophy of the prostate. Possibly this may be explained by claiming that it tends toward the production of a normal condition, reducing parts when unhealthily enlarged, and increasing them when atrophied. At any rate, it has been lauded as the "old man's friend," giving relief from the many annoyances commonly attributed to enlarged prostate. May its results not be due to its control over urethral irritation, and thereby reducing swollen conditions not in reality amounting to hypertrophy? Besides this, it increases the tonus of the bladder, allowing a better contraction and more perfect expulsion of the contents of that viscus. Thus it overcomes the tenesmic pain so dreaded by the sufferer. We would rather regard it a remedy for prostatic irritation and relaxation of tissue than for a hypertrophied prostate. It is said to relieve aching, dull, throbbing pain in the prostatic portion of the urethra, with mucoid or prostatic discharge. It relieves the irritation following a badly-treated gonorrhœa. Orchitis, ovaritis, orchialgia, ovaralgia, and epidymitis have been asserted cured with it. It is reputed to restore sexual activity after exhaustive excesses, and, even in the feeble woman, strengthens the sexual appetite. Long-continued use of it is said to slowly and surely cause the mammæ to enlarge. Its reputed power to reduce uterine hypertrophy is probably due to its power over relaxed tissues, the organ being not in reality hypertrophied, but large, flabby, and actively leucorrhœal. The remedy needs a more careful and extended study. The dose of the fluid extract is from 1 to 60 drops; of specific saw palmetto, 1 to 60 drops.