or Camphire, a solid concrete juice extracted from the wood of the laurus camphora. See Laurus, Chemistry, and Materia Medica.

Pure camphire is very white, pellucid, somewhat unctuous to the touch; of a bitterish aromatic taste, yet accompanied with a sense of coolness; of a very fragrant smell, somewhat like that of rosemary, but much stronger. It has been very long esteemed one of the most efficacious diaphoretics; and has been celebrated in fevers, malignant and epidemical distempers. In deliria, also, where opiates could not procure sleep, but rather aggravated the symptoms, this medicine has often been observed to procure it. All these effects, however, Dr Cullen attributes to its sedative property, and denies that camphire has any other medicinal virtues than those of an antipathmodic and sedative. He allows it to be very powerful, and capable of doing much good or much harm. From experiments made on different brute creatures, camphire appears to be poisonous to every one of them. In some it produced sleep followed by death, without any other symptom. In others, before death, they were awakened into convulsions and rage. It seems, too, to act chiefly on the stomach; for an entire piece swallowed, produced the abovementioned effects with very little diminution of weight.