Carica papaya - Papaw, Pawpaw, Melon-tree
"CONSTITUENTS: The active principle has been variously named papain, papaotin, papoid or caroid. It is precipitated by alcohol, is a nitrogenous principle approximating in character a true albuminoid, and is associated with vegetable peptones and a milk-curdling ferment.
Therapy: It is a reliable remedy for general distress or pain in the stomach and bowels during the process of digestion. It can be prescribed almost without discrimination in these cases, and the results are in some cases surprising. It may be given during the meal, and pain not occur for an hour. At that time, its influence being probably spent, another dose will continue the effects of the first. Its effects become permanent usually in acute or subacute cases after a few days, when it may be discontinued.
It is not a remedy for pain occurring before meals or after the food is digested, or for gastric pain occurring without regard to the taking of food—continuous pain and distress—since these pains are either neuralgic or organic in character. The agent is specifically one for functional disorder. It is a most valuable agent in catarrh of the stomach and in the digestive failure accompanying continued fevers. It stimulates the stomach in the beginning of convalescence, and in some cases increases the appetite and promotes absorption of the digested pabulum.
It is serviceable in the digestive disorders of pregnancy, stimulating appropriation and assimilation. In those cases where the digestion is seriously interfered with during the last three months of pregnancy, it being almost impossible, because of the great pain induced, for the patient to take any food into the stomach, the condition will be entirely relieved by this agent within a few days, the patient being enabled to eat large meals of meat without discomfort and with satisfaction.
The agent is a solvent of fibrin, and has been used to dissolve false membranes, old hardened tissue, warts, and tumors, and has been satisfactorily applied to epithelioma.
Mortimer Granville reports several cases of cancer of the stomach treated very satisfactorily with this agent. In diphtheria the powder serves a most useful purpose in dissolving and permitting the removal of the densest exudate, which in some cases covers the pharynx and naso-pharynx, and occludes the nares. Good results have been reported by Jacobi, Hubert and others, and have come under our own observation. Kota and Asche are reported in the Prescription as having observed more than a hundred cases treated with success by this method.
Empirically it has been used in a few cases of nephritic colic with the most marked results. It will diminish the formation of the oxalates, al. though in cases where tried there has been an increase in uric acid."
(Finley Ellingwood: The American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy, 1915)