71. Cheiranthus Chieri, Linn.

The medicinal plant Cheiranthus Chieri, Linn is a member of the Brassicaceae or Cruciferae (mustards) family. This page includes its habitat, botanical descption, medicinal uses (eg., Ayurveda), chemical constituents and history of use in modern and ancient India.

Index in Flora of British India (Hooker): 1.132.

English:—The English wild “Wall-flower”.

Habitat:—Not indigenous, but cultivated in gardens in North India.

Vernacular:—Todri Surkh, Lahoori shuboo (H); Khueri (B).

Botanical description:—

Stem: shrubby, erect, bushy, branched in a determinate manner; branches angular, leafy, hoary, with close bristly silvery hairs, chiefly directed downwards, like those on both sides of the leaves; though some point the contrary way, on the leaves as well as the siliqua, being perfectly distinct from others.

Leaves: crowded, stalked, lanceolate, acute, almost invariably entire; the lower-most, if any, more or less of a minute silvery hoariness especially at the back.

Flowers: corymbose, sweet-scented.

Petals: always of a uniform bright golden yellow, not stained with brown or blood-red as in the Garden Ch. Cheiri of England, though the calyx is purplish. Siliqua racemose, erect 1½-2 in. long, covered with close hairs chiefly, if not altogether, pointing upwards.

Style: prominent, crowned with a cloven stigma.

Seeds: flat, with a narrow membranous, deciduous border at one side as well as the summit of each.

Parts used:—The flowers and seeds.

Medicinal uses:—The flowers, said to be cardiac and emmenagogue, are used in paralysis and impotence. The seed is also used as an aphrodisiac (Irvine).

The dried petals are much used in Upper India as an aromatic stimulant (O’Shaughnessy).

The flowers are employed to make a medicated oil; for this purpose they are boiled in olive oil; this prepared oil is much used for enemata (Year-Book of Pharmacy, 1874, p. 622).

Chemical properties:—By extracting the flowers with low-boiling solvents, a dark-coloured pasty extract is obtained which (after evaporation of the solvent and separation from fatty and waxy matters by strong alcohol) yields, on distillation with steam, a yellowish oil of unpleasant odour having a specific gravity of 1.001, and distilling under 3 mm. pressure between 40° and 150°C. the yield is about 0.06 per cent. The alcoholic solution shows a feeble bluish fluorescence. A highly diluted alcoholic solution possesses the characteristic odour of the flowers. The oil is found to contain:—Compounds resembling mustard oil, ketones and aldehydes (having the odors of Violets and Hawthorn), nerol, geraniol, benzyl, linalool, indole, methyl antheranilate, acetic acid (probably in combination with benzyl alcohol and linalool), salicylic acid (probably as methyl salicylate) and traces of phenols and lactones. (J. Ch. I. July 15,1911, p. 829).

Cheiranthin is obtained by evaporating the alcoholic or aqueous extract of the leaves or seeds of the wall-flower, removing the inactive oils by light petroleum, treating with lead acetate, and finally salting out the glucoside with magnesium, Sodium or ammonium sulphate, when it separates in small yellow flakes, from which the salts may be removed by means of alcohol and ether. It may also be precipitated by tannin, and in either case still contains an active alkaloid which may be removed by shaking with ether or ethylic acetate. Cheiranthin brings about the characteristic rest is frogs. (J. Ch. S. LXXVI., pt. I (1899), p. 378.)

The physiological action of Cheiranthin resembles that of the digitalis compounds.

Cheirinine, C₁₈H₃₅O₁₇N₃, obtained from the alcoholic extract of the seeds of the wall-flower, crystallises in small, colourless needles, melts at 73—74°, and is soluble in warm water, alcohol, ether, chloroform, or ethylacetate. The aqueous solution is neutral and gives precipitates with the ordinary alkaloidal reagents. The physiological action of cheirinine resembles that of quinine.

The seeds also contain choline. J. Ch. S. LXXVIII. pt. I. (1900) p. 186.