Hyssop (Hyssopus officinalis)

HYSSOP, Hyssopus officinalis L., a perennial plant of the family Labiatae, growing wild in Southern Europe, the Crimea, and the Caucasus, and cultivated as a garden plant, because its young leaves are used for food as a salad. Its four-sided stem bears opposite, almost sessile, entire-flowered leaves of a lanceolate shape. Numerous bilabiate flowers, grouped in inflorescences resembling racemose panicles, are usually colored blue, or more rarely reddish or white. The entire plant without roots (Herba Hyssopi), collected during flowering, is used as a pharmaceutical preparation. In a dried state, hyssop possesses a camphor-like odor and a spicy, bitter taste. Its constituent parts, besides essential oil (0.3-0.9%), containing l-pinene (C₁₀H₁₆) and l-pinocamphone (C₁₀H₁₆O), are: tannins, resin, fat, malic acid, sugar, and salts. Hyssop is used in folk medicine internally as a tea and externally as a tincture for respiratory tract diseases. The essential oil, Oleum Hyssopi, was previously proposed, exclusively on empirical grounds, as a remedy for syphilis and leprosy (0.1-0.2 pro dosi). HISTERIOSIS, an increased excitability of centers created by prolonged tetanization of an afferent nerve (Vvedensky). If any afferent nerve is irritated for a long time, the irritation of this nerve rather quickly ceases to cause a visible effect, and reflex muscle contractions stop. On this basis, the idea arose that sensory neurons undergo fatigue sooner than motor ones. Vvedensky showed in 1910 that during prolonged tetanization of a sensory nerve, this irritation, although it ceases to exert a visible reflex influence, nevertheless causes deep functional changes in the centers. Gradually (after approximately one hour), the excitability of the central nervous system, especially of the center to which the prolonged irritation of the afferent nerve comes, begins to rise sharply. This manifests itself in a sharp drop in the thresholds of irritation for a nerve adjacent to the one undergoing prolonged tetanization. This is very clearly visible, for example, when irritating the tibial nerve after prolonged tetanitic irritation of the peroneal nerve. Examining the relationship between histeriosis and the dominant focus, Ukhtomsky's school showed that during histeriosis, the centers are incapable of summation of excitation.