Medicinal plant

“ Whenever these peculiarities co–exist in a plant, we may be sure that there is nothing deleterious about it. More than fifty different plants formed on this plan grow wild in England, and considerably over two thousand in foreign countries, and not one of them is in the least degree noxious, either to quadruped or to man. Many are aromatic, and used with food, as thyme, sage, mint, basil, and penny–royal; while others are useful for medicinal tea, as balm and ground–ivy. ”

“ Nevertheless, among these people, a plant not found by any medical scientist to possess any curative powers is used almost universally, to cure every kind of ailment and has been so used for generations. ”

“ In the botanical history of the middle ages, as more especially developed in Macer’s Herbal, there was not a plant of medicinal use, that was not placed under the dominion of some planet, and must neither be gathered nor applied but with observances that savoured of the 13most absurd superstition, and which we find were preserved as late as the seventeenth century, by the astrological herbalists, Turner, Culpepper, and Lovel. ”

“ The herbalists’ knowledge of plants must have been in the first place transmitted from generation to generation entirely by word of mouth, but as time went on, written records began to replace the oral tradition. The earliest extant European work dealing with medicinal plants is the famous Materia Medica of Dioscorides, which was accepted as an almost infallible authority as late as the Renaissance period. ”

“ A low-growing annual plant, widely spread throughout the tropics of the old world, and considered by the Hindus to possess medicinal virtues, a decoction of the entire herb being administered in febrile affections in order to promote perspiration. ”

“ The herbalists seem to have attempted to keep their business select by fencing it about with all manner of superstitions, most of which have for their moral that herb-collecting is too dangerous an occupation for the uninitiated. Theophrastus draws attention to the absurdity of some of the root-diggers’ directions for gathering medicinal plants. ”

“ In sandy soil the smell of plants is often entirely lost; and the taste is frequently changed, according to the nature of the land and the manure. The most powerful medicinal plants are those which grow wild in their native345 country, and not those reared in rich gardens, where many poisonous plants become eatable. Even the duration does not always determine the difference of the species. ”

“ The foundation of the Royal College of Physicians in 1681 gave expression to the co-operative principle in the control of those who would profess Medicine; the creation of a Botanic Garden for the purpose of the cultivation of medicinal plants was the response in the direction of safeguarding the practitioner against the herbalist, and of giving him the advantage of a correct knowledge of the plants which were the source of the drugs he himself was to compound. ”

“ Cultivate or prepare as many of them as possible, and endeavour to enlarge the materia medica, by exploring the untrodden fields and forests of the United States. The ipecacuanha, the Seneka and Virginia snake-roots, the Carolina pink-root, the spice-wood, the sassafras, the butter-nut, the thoroughwort, the poke, and the stramonium, are [407] but a small part of the medicinal productions of America. I have no doubt but there are many hundred other plants which now exhale invaluable medicinal virtues in the desert air. ”

“ The references to flowers and trees in ancient poems show that the beauty of vegetable Nature was fully appreciated at an early period, and agriculture requires the rudiments of a scientific knowledge of plants; but the first systematic attempts to study botany scientifically owe their origin to the desire to know more of plants in their relation to medicine. There are few plants which have not at some time been supposed to have great medicinal value, as the number of those designated officinalis clearly indicates. ”

“ This idea is one which constantly recurs in the herbals. In 1664 Robert Turner wrote, “For what Climate soever is subject to any particular Disease, in the same Place there grows a Cure.” There is ample evidence of the survival of this theory even in the nineteenth century; for instance, in the preface to Thomas Green’s ‘Universal Herbal’ of 1816 we find the remark, “Nature has, in this country, as well as in all others, provided, in the herbs of its own growth, the remedies for the several diseases to which it is most subject.” ”

“ Herbal Simples stand to-day safely determined on sure ground by the help of the accurate chemist. They hold their own with the best, and rank high for homely cures, because of their proved constituents. Their manifest healing virtues are shown to depend on medicinal elements plainly disclosed by analysis. Henceforward the curtain of oblivion must fall on cordial waters distilled mechanically from sweet herbs, and on electuaries artlessly compounded of seeds and roots by a Lady Monmouth, or a Countess of Arundel, as in the Stuart and Tudor times. ”

“ Near together are the buds, the full-blown flowers, and those which already bear seed, the virgin and the fecundated plants, the flowers without fragrance and those with pleasant perfume, the poisonous, and the useful, the healing weed. Frequently the plant which takes the humblest place in the system, as the flowerless fern, is the most beautiful to the eye. ”

“ After this period, botany rapidly became more scientific; the discovery of the function of the stamens, which was first announced in 1682, marking a very definite step in advance. As time went on, the herbal, with its characteristic mixture of medical and botanical lore, gave way before the exclusively medical pharmacopœia on the one hand, and the exclusively botanical flora on the other. As the use of home-made remedies declined, and the chemist’s shop took the place of the housewife’s herb-garden and still-room, the practical value of the herbal diminished almost to vanishing point. ”

“ To see a well-cut herbal, herbs, trees, flowers, plants, all vegetables expressed in their proper colours to the life, as that of Matthiolus upon Dioscorides, Delacampius, Lobel, Bauhinus, and that last voluminous and mighty herbal of Beslar of Nuremberg, wherein almost every plant is to his own bigness. ”

“ For they are full of the old herb lore and of the uses of herbs in homely medicines. It must be remembered that even as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries every woman was supposed to have some knowledge of both the preparation and the medicinal use of herbs and simples. ”

“ At the end of the present work is appended a glossary of Indian plants described by Sanskrit writers. In the body of the work I have selected for notice only such drugs and plants as have some definite use in a particular disease, or class of diseases. Numerous other plants used in medicine incidentally, or for economic purposes, are mentioned by Sanskrit writers, but these are not of sufficient importance in a medicinal point of view to deserve detailed notice in a work of this sort. ”

“ The present manual of our native Herbal Simples seeks rather to justify their uses on the sound basis of accurate chemical analysis, and precise elementary research. Hitherto medicinal herbs have come down to us from early times as possessing only a traditional value, and as exercising merely empirical effects. ”

“ They are sensible to the action of nourishment, air, and light, and either thrive or languish according to the wholesome or hurtful application of these stimulants. This is evident to all who have ever seen a plant growing in a climate, soil, or situation, not suitable to it. ”

“ But of all the plants we have seen among these people, that which is the most excellent in its kind, and which really excels most if not all that are put to the same uses in other countries, is the plant which serves them instead of hemp or flax. ”

“ The medicinal properties of plants are thus the outcome of qualities that are not obvious at sight. How, then, is the physician to be guided in selecting herbal remedies to cure the several ailments of his patients? The answer to this question given by Paracelsus is summed up in what is known as the Doctrine of Signatures. ”

“ It is evident that those aromatic compounds which occur as normal secretions of plants and which give to the plants their characteristic odors may act either as an attraction to animals which might utilize the plants as food and so serve to distribute the seed forms, or as a repellent to prevent the too rapid destruction of the leaves, stems, or seeds of certain species of plants whose slow-growing habits require the long-continued growth of these portions of the plant for the perpetuation of the species. ”

“ Neither to be discovered in the quaint Herbals of primitive times, nor to be learnt by the advanced chemical knowledge of modern plant lore, is there any panacea for all the ills to which our flesh is heir, or an elixir of life, which can secure for us a perpetual immunity from sickness. Contra vim mortis nullum medicamentum in hortis, says the rueful Latin distich:—
"No healing herb can conquer death,
And so for always give us breath." ”

“ But the skilled expert of to-day resolves his herbal simples into their ultimate elements by exact analysis in the laboratory, and has learnt to attach its proper medicinal virtue to each of these curative principles. It has thus come about that Herbal Physic under competent guidance, if pursued with intelligent care, is at length a reliable science of fixed methods, and crowned with sure results. ”

“ The juice heated with the oil of Roses, and dropped into the ears, eases them of the noise and singing in them, and of deafness also. Outwardly applied with wheat flour, in manner of a poultice, it gives ease to the sciatica and palsied members, heating and warming them, and takes away their pains. It also takes away the pain that comes by stinging of bees, wasps, &c.
SAVINE.
To describe a plant so well known is needless, it being nursed up almost in every garden, and abides green all the Winter. ”

“ Nearly all the drugs and medicines of importance are of vegetable origin, and from the days of Theophrastus the study of plants as possible medicines has been one of the chief phases of botanical research. In the early days all that was known about plants was learned by men interested in medicine, and some of their quaint old books are interesting relics of a bygone day. ”

“ They are all three herbs of Jupiter and under Leo, all great cordials, and great strengtheners of nature. The leaves and roots are to very good purpose used in putrid and pestilential fevers, to defend the heart, and help to resist and expel the poison, or the venom of other creatures: the seed is of the like effect; and the seed and leaves are good to increase milk in women’s breasts; the leaves, flowers, and seed, all or any of them, are good to expel pensiveness and melancholy ”

“ Perhaps the most obvious of these is the incalculable debt which Botany owes to Medicine. An overwhelming majority of the herbalists were physicians, who were led to the study of botany on account of its connection with the arts of healing. As we have already pointed out, medicine gave the original impulse, not only to Systematic Botany, but also to the study of the Anatomy of Plants.
However, as the evolution of the herbal proceeded, we have shown that botany rose from being a mere hand-maid of medicine to a position of comparative independence. ”

“ The roots grow thick, great and deep, spreading much, and enduring long, of a brownish colour on the outside, and whitish within. The whole plant and every part of it smelling strong, and aromatically, and is of a hot, sharp, biting taste. ”

“ It may naturally be expected that these inhabitants of the field and forest, the lane and the moor, are not without a knowledge of the medicinal qualities of certain herbs. In all slight disorders they have recourse to these remedies, and frequently use the inner bark of the elm, star-in-the-earth, parsley, pellitory-in-the-wall, and wormwood. ”

“ Other plants not always pleasant to handle are meadow-saffron bulbs, garlic, juice of bloodwort and celandine, the smartweed, the herbage of the poke, monkshood, larkspur, bearberry, some of the buttercups, anemone, star cucumber, various burs, daisy flowers, hairy plants, the nettles, sneeze-weed, the corpse plant, and some of the toadstools. ”

“ Not so well acquainted with the oeconomy of nature, which teaches us that plants were chiefly destined for the food of various animals, they sought in every herb some latent healing virtue, and frequently endeavoured to make up the want of efficacy in one by the combination of numbers: hence the extreme length of their farraginous prescriptions. More enlightened ideas of the operations of medicine have taught the moderns greater simplicity and conciseness in practice. ”

“ He supposed, for example, that long-lived plants would lengthen a man’s life, while short-lived plants would abbreviate it. He held that herbs with a yellow sap would cure jaundice, while those whose surface was rough to the touch would heal those diseases that destroy the natural smoothness of the skin. The resemblance of certain plants to certain animals opened to Porta a vast field of dogmatism on a basis of conjecture. ”

“ MANDRAKE FROM A SAXON HERBAL
(Sloane 1975, folio 49a)
In the treatment of disease we find that the material remedies, by which I mean remedies devoid of any mystic meaning, are with few exceptions entirely herbal. The herb drinks were made up with ale, milk or vinegar, many of the potions were made of herbs mixed with honey, and ointments were made of herbs worked up with butter. The most scientific prescription is that for a vapour bath, [22] and there are suggestions for what may become fashionable once more—herb baths. ”