The pale yellow male flowers, immersed in a solution of common
salt, are also used to give zest to the soiled appetite, the
combination of flavour being olive-like, piquant and grateful. The seeds
used as a thirst-quencher form component parts of a drink welcome to
fever patients. The papaw and the banana in conjunction form an
absolutely perfect diet. What the one lacks in nutritive or assimilative
qualities the other supplies. No other food, it is asserted is essential
to maintain a man in perfect health and vigour. Our fictitious appetites
may pine for wheaten bread, oatmeal, flesh, fish, eggs, and all manner
of vegetables but given the papaw and the banana, the rest are
superfluous. Where the banana grows the papaw flourishes. Each is
singular from the fact that it represents wholesome food long before
arrival at maturity.
Then as a medicine plant the papaw is of great renown. The peculiar
properties of the milky juice which exudes from every part of the plant
were noticed two hundred years ago. The active principle of the juice
known as papain, said to be capable of digesting two hundred times its
weight of fibrine, is used for many disorders and ailments, from
dyspepsia to ringworm and ichthyosis or fish-skin disease.
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