Purple Coneflower

Echinacea is a beautiful herb grown in many borders, home flower gardens, and pollinator plantings. How did one of the many snake oil remedies that saturated the Midwest in the1800s cause this pretty purple petalled wildflower to become one of the most popular herbal medicines used today in the U.S.?

Let’s go back to about 1869, when H.C.F. Meyer, a German lay physician living in Nebraska, learned about the herb from a Native American woman who taught him how she used it for wounds and snakebites. Years later, he offered to travel to Cincinnati to show two eminent doctors of the time that he would incur a rattlesnake bite and then cure it with his Echinacea remedy. He even offered to provide the snake. The doctors declined the demonstration. They did not believe an herb could cure as many conditions as Meyer and many Native Americans had claimed. Although the rattlesnake feat was rejected, in 1887, Dr. John King and other electics began to study and use Echinacea. The herb quickly rose from obscurity to be a top seller. Doctors routinely prescribed it in Europe and the U.S. for coughs, colds, fevers, sore throats, headaches, wounds, and many other ailments until it fell out of use with the advent of antibiotics in the 1930s.

Echinacea purpurea (purple coneflower, which is shown above) and E. angustifolia (narrow-leaved purple coneflower) are native only to the eastern and midwestern regions of North America, which is why Dr. G. Madaus brought seeds to Germany in the late 1930s for extensive research lasting decades. A revival of interest in the herb began in the U.S. in the 1970s that continues until today.

While we no longer have Meyer’s Blood Purifier for snakebite or Dr. Bonker’s Celebrated Egyptian Oil for cholera, Echinacea continues to excel both as an herbal remedy and a lovely landscape plant.

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