The Materia Medica of the Hindus, compiled from Sanskrit Medical Works c6.s7.10

c6.s7.10

पुराणघृत *Purána ghrita*. Clarified butter more than ten years old, passes by this name.¹ It has a strong pungent odour and the colour of lac. The longer this old butter is kept the more efficacious it is said to prove as an external application. Clarified butter a hundred years old is often heard of. The richer natives always have a stock of old *ghrita* of this description which they preserve with care for their own use as well as for distribution to their poorer neighbours. I have seen some specimens of old clarified butter which were quite dry and hard and nearly inodorous. They looked more like some sort of earth than an animal substance. Old clarified butter is used externally. It is first repeatedly washed with cold water, and then rubbed with it till it is reduced to a soapy frothy fluid which is used as a liniment. It is regarded as cooling and emollient and is much used in nervous diseases such as insanity, epilepsy, neuralgia, paralysis, cephalalgia and asthma, in rheumatic affections, stiff joints, burning of the body, hands or feet, affections of the eyes, etc.²