These are drugs which, when locally applied, are intended to produce temporary redness and congestion of the skin. Some of them are vesicant if applied in full strength, and, if their contact with the skin be sufficiently prolonged, pustulation, or even total destruction of tissue, may result.

The following list embraces the principal rubefacient drugs:

Ammonia, Alcohol, Arnica, Camphor, Capsicum, Chloroform, Ether, Iodine, Menthol, Mezereum, Mustard, Oil of cajuput, Oil of turpentine, Pitch, Volatile oils.

Hot water and friction are also rubefacient agents.

Rubefacients are used for their influence upon the skin itself or for their effect on deep-seated structures.

Rubefacients are efficient means of relieving neuralgic pains, conditions of nervous debility, nervous excitement, the sense of fatigue, and as aids in narcotic poisoning, also to hasten the absorption of inflammatory exudates, to remove the swelling and restore the function of chronically inflamed joints, etc.

Rubefacients should ordinarily be applied with friction, as rubbing of the skin aids the action of many of them.

Save one, all the rubefacients mentioned in the preceding list have been considered elsewhere in the present work.