HERB - Re: jalap and PDR & a tagential query

[Rauthulfr]

Greetings from Rauthulfr;
One of the places where I managed to find information on Jalap, which they 
give as "Ipomea purga" is at:
http://chili.rt66.com/hrbmoore/ManualsOther/Culbreth.html
This is a HUGE size download of the adobe acrobat text of the scanned pages 
of a rather old Materia Medica.  The download is image rather than text 
based, so once it is downloaded it cannot be used for cut and paste like a 
normal electronic text can be.
A Manual of Materia Medica and Pharmacology,
by David M.R. Culbreth, Ph.G., M.D. (7th edition, 1927)

I brought this up because Culbreth discuss False Jalap under the chapter on 
adulterations.
One thing I've wondered about the Herbal PDR is whether there were problems 
because their primary source seems to have been German?  This might be one 
of the problems with their selection of common names.

One of my personal difficulties with the Herbal PDR is that there are some 
very powerful and dangerous herbs for which they make a note to the effect 
that there are no dangers if taken in the standard clinical dose.  Granted 
the text will usually cite the dangerous compounds and their effects, but 
this information seems to receive less emphasis the discussion of side 
effects in the standard PDR which discusses prescription medicinals.  This 
is perhaps more significant if taken in consideration that the Herbal PDR 
is a work which is going to have a much broader basis of use among those 
without some degree of training, formally or otherwise  with herbal medicinals.

The Common names for any plant have always seemed to me to be more ore less 
a collection of what are supposed to be cognates pertaining to any given 
plant.  However, they are cognates which have the unfortunate difficulty of 
often being applied to different varieties and even to species in totally 
different species.  (I once was discussing plantain with a lady who had 
moved to An Tir from the East, and she had never heard of the 
plant.  Although when I picked one and showed it to her she recognized it 
instantly.  Oh, Pig's Ears!  The point being that the plant which I had 
heard called Pig's Ears was something all together different.  Which, of 
course, is why technical nomenclature is so vastly important in the herbal 
arts.

This actually leads to my question, which I suspect Agnes, among others, 
may want to  address.  While I can't speak from any formal botanical 
training, it does seem to me that there is a marked degree of  divergence 
in the use of botanical nomenclature.  I suspect that a fair amount of this 
is because Botanical Science, like any other is a growing discipline which 
continues to refine its taxonomy,  so a work written in the 1940's might 
not use the same name as one printed in the 1990's.  But I also wonder how 
much may be due to a lack of rigidly applied uniform naming practices on 
both sides of the Atlantic until recent times?  For example do the names 
listed in Hortus III correspond with the names given in a equivalent book 
written in the US?


At 08:51 AM 4/20/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Greetings from Agnes
>ships
>PDR for Herbal medicine says jalap is _Ipomoea orizabensis_ from Mexico.  What
>is weird is that in the header they say "jalap" and in the Leaves Stem and 
>Root
>section they begin "False jalap is a twining plant..."  So I am confused why
>false jalap is mentioned.  I have several of this kind of problem with the PDR
>for Herbal Medicine:  I think some of the pictures are quite misleading, 
>if not
>wrong, choice of common names is often going to cause trouble (loosestife),
>botanical nomenclatureis misused. I tried calling three times to offer to help
>them fix the botanical problems and spent a lot of money on long distance 
>hold,
>and promised callback never came.  If any of you know how to effectively
>contact them, I was trying to offer my professional skills (professor of
>biology) to fix the botanical errors in the book.  It _is_ only the first
>edition.
>
>Agnes


RauthulfR Meistari inn Orthstori (OL, mCE, P-eX, Et Cetera)
or, non-SCA: Michael Wolfe M. A. I. S. AB-
*Practice Random Acts of Chocolate.....

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