A new study based on a mostly forgotten guide to medicinal plants, ‘Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests,’ focuses on three of the plants and shows they inhibit bacteria associated with wound infections.

Scientific Reports is publishing the results of the study led by scientists at Emory University. The results show that extracts from the plants have antimicrobial activity against one or more of a trio of dangerous species of multi-drug-resistant bacteria associated with wound infections: Acinetobacter baumannii, Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumoniae.

«Our findings suggest that the use of these topical therapies may have saved some limbs, and maybe even lives, during the Civil War,» says Cassandra Quave, senior author of the paper and assistant professor at Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health and the School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology.

Quave is an ethnobotanist, studying how people use plants in traditional healing practices, to uncover promising candidates for new drugs. «Ethnobotany is essentially the science of survival — how people get by when limited to what’s available in their immediate environment,» she says. «The Civil War guide to plant remedies is a great example of that.»

«Our research might one day benefit modern wound care, if we can identify which compounds are responsible for the antimicrobial activity,» adds Micah Dettweiler, the first author of the paper.

If the active ingredients are identified, «it is my hope that we can then [further] test these molecules in our world-renowned models of bacterial infection,» says co-author Daniel Zurawski, chief of pathogenesis and virulence for the Wound Infections Department at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

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