ASPAND MEDICINAL (watercress, water nasturtium)
Perennial herbaceous plant with a hollow furrowed stem, lying and rooting at the base, 10-60 sometimes 100 cm high. The leaves are pinnately dissected, lower with 3, upper with 3-7 pairs of oblong or oval sessile notched lateral lobes and larger, rounded or ovoid, petiolate. Flowers are white, in short racemes. Blooms from May to August.
Grows within streams, springs, often almost in water, occurs in small numbers. Distributed in the western forest-steppe, in some places in the steppe and in the middle part of the European regions of Russia.
With a therapeutic purpose in folk medicine, only a fresh plant, collected during flowering, is used. Dried grass loses its medicinal properties.
Application
Fresh juice from watercress herb (1 teaspoon 3 times every day) is drunk with cholelithiasis, with stones and sand in the kidneys and bladder, with acute and chronic inflammation of the kidneys, with all types of gastric catarrhs and as a mild laxative, with jaundice .
You can use not only juice, but also a decoction of it (necessarily from fresh grass) at the rate of 20-40 g per 1 liter of boiling water; drink 1 glass 3 times every day. Such use is permissible to restore metabolism in skin diseases.
Watercress in the form of a salad of fresh young leaves or boiled as a seasoning is used for scurvy and anemia.
Outwardly, for the treatment of burns, an ointment from one-2-uh st. spoons of watercress juice per 50 g of butter; in the manufacture of the ointment, it is necessary to carefully grind the oil and juice so that the components mix well, or melt with thorough stirring until the mass cools completely.