Guaiacan

The wood, bark, gum, and rosin, are the parts of guaiacan used in medicine. Guaiacan is a warm stimulant, diaphoretic, and corroborant. The resin, improperly called gum, is attenuant, stimulant, expectorant, aperient, and purgative.

Perhaps the most interesting early description of one of the many variants of the guaiacan treatment is that of Nicholas Monardes who wrote of the cure in 1574.

Seizing an axe, Aguirre began madly chopping at the rollo; but it was of the dense wood called lignum vitae, or guaiacan, and "the steel flew from the hatchets, while the rollo received no particular harm, and some prognosticated that it would remain there, as representing justice, and the name of the king, by whom it had been erected; and not by traitors.