DULCAMARA, so named from its taste, at first bitter and eventually sweet, iβ a drug consisting of the dried young branches of Solanum Dulcamara, Bitter-sweet or Woody Nightshade—a woody perennial of the natural order Solanaceoe. It has a slender shrubby and climbing stem; flowers in lateral or terminal cymes, with a hypogynous purple corolla, and yellow anthers converging into a cone; and fruit a red, oval, scarlet berry. For medical purposes the branches are collected in autumn when the leaves are shed. Dulcamara contains an alkaloid solanine, C 43 H 71 NO lβ (Zwenger and Kind), besides a sweet and bitter principle, dulcamarine or picroglycion, and other matters. The drug was formerly supposed to be efficacious in a great variety of complaints. It appears to have some effect on the skin and kidneys, and the infusion is now administered in chronic skin diseases, cachectic conditions of the system, and rheumatic affections.

See D. Cauvet, Des Solanées, Strasburg, 1864; Garrod, Materia Medica, 4th. ed. 1874.