Papaveraceae
Sanguinaria canadensis
Bloodroot · Red puccoon
- Part used
- rhizome
- Native range
- Eastern North America, in rich woodland
- Morphology
- A spring woodland perennial with a single deeply lobed leaf wrapped around one white eight-petalled flower. The rhizome bleeds a bright orange-red sap when cut, which is what names it.
What is in it
Evidence
No supported medicinal use. Sanguinarine was used in toothpaste and mouthwash in the 1980s and 90s and was withdrawn after an association with oral leukoplakia, a precancerous lesion.
Safety
Sanguinarine is a potent escharotic — it kills tissue indiscriminately. This is the principal ingredient of black salve, sold online as a cancer cure, and it causes severe disfigurement: documented cases include destruction of the nose, extensive facial scarring, and cancers left to progress beneath the wound while the patient believed the salve was drawing them out. Ingestion causes vomiting, hypotension and collapse. Epidemic dropsy has been caused by contamination of cooking oil with the related Argemone.
Regulatory: Sale of black salve as a cancer treatment is illegal in Australia and the TGA has prosecuted suppliers. Not a permitted therapeutic ingredient.
Historical use
Used by Cherokee, Iroquois and other eastern peoples as a dye and a medicine. Adopted by the Eclectic physicians for respiratory complaints, and incorporated into nineteenth-century escharotic cancer preparations.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Bloodroot is the plant in this collection that has done the most identifiable harm to individual people in the present tense, and it is not a historical harm.
Black salve is sold online as a cancer cure. Its active ingredient is sanguinarine, and it works exactly as advertised in one narrow sense: it destroys tissue. What it cannot do is distinguish tumour from healthy skin, cartilage or bone. The dermatology and surgical literature carries case after case of people with treatable skin cancers who applied it, watched a black eschar form and separate — which sellers describe as the salve "drawing out the root" — and presented later with facial destruction and a tumour that had gone on growing underneath.
Australia's TGA has prosecuted suppliers. It continues to be sold.
This is the clearest single case for why this section exists. The plant is real, the mechanism is real, the tradition citing it is real, and the product is causing disfigurement right now.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.