Muira Puama

Along the black-water rivers of the Amazon, muira puama has long been dug up by hand, its knotted roots split open and boiled down into a tonic said to restore vitality to a tired body and a dull mind. Indigenous communities of the Brazilian Amazon traditionally turned to it as a general nerve tonic, a remedy for fatigue and low spirits, and, most famously, as a restorative for waning desire and reproductive vigor in both men and women. It traveled to Europe in the early twentieth century, where French and German herbalists took up its Amazonian reputation and began calling it potency wood, a nickname it still carries in herbal shops today. Brazilian folk healers also brewed it for aching joints and sluggish digestion, treating it as something of an everyday pick-me-up root.