ELATE'RIUM, a drug obtained from the fruit of the SQUIRTING CUCUMBER, or SPIRTING (ecbaliam agreste, formerly known as momordica elaterium), also called the wild cucumber, an annual plant of the natural order cucurbitacem, a native of the s. of Europe, common on rubbish in the villages of Greece and the archipelago. The whole plant is rough, with stiff hairs; it has a trailing branching stem, without tendrils; the leaves are heart-shaped, somewhat lobed and toothed, on long stalks; the flowers axillary, yellow, the male flowers in small racemes; the fruit oblong, about an inch and a half long. grayish green, covered with soft prickles, and finally parting from its stalk, and expelling its seeds along with a thin mucus through the aperture where the stalk was inserted. This remarkable phonomenon is ascribed to osmotic action within the fruit; a thin membrane separating a mucus which immediately surrounds the seeds from a less dense juice which abounds in the succulent part of the fruit, and the quantity of the former being gradually increased at the expense of the latter, till, on the perfect ripening of the fruit, the much distended central cell is opened, to permit its ejection. It is this mucus surrounding the seeds—a thick green mucus of a
very peculiar character—which contains the elaterium. To obtain the drug, the juice of the nearly ripened fruit is allowed to stand for a short time, when it becomes turbid, and deposits a sediment. The sediment, carefully collected and dried, is elaterium. It is of a pale grayish-green color, light and friable, with an acrid taste, and a peculiar not unpleasant odor. It is an exceedingly"powerful or drastic purgative, used chiefly in dropsies, and in very small often-repeated doses. It should not be used except under medical advice. It acts as an irritant not only on the eyes, if it comes in contract with them, but even on the fingers of those who handle it. Its properties seem to depend chiefly on a crystalline principle called elaterin. The use of E. was known to the Ancients. A few acres of the squirting cucumber are grown at Mitcham, in Surrey.