HERB - A Modern Herbal

[Jenne Heise]

>   I believe this was the last large,comprehensive English herbal written
> before chemical (Penicillin,  sulpha,  etc. ) medicine took over.  Doctors
> and lay people used herbs as medicine every day up to the thirties.  So Miss
> Grieve's book gives us a main stream view of herbalisim as a science  before
> modern medicine.

At the risk of being pedantic, I think you may be overstating the case,
actually. While doctors and pharmacists did use herbs (older texts have
repeated mentions of thus and such an herb being in the US Pharmacopia),
the use of herbs by laypeople had more or less fallen by the wayside in
most communities, except through the usual pharmocological channels. There
was a resurgence of use-- probably what prompted Mrs. Grieves-- beginning
in the 20's and 30's because of the herb garden craze, followed by
shortages of cash, and later, rationing in the 40's. 

Though there were laypeople still using herbs, they were already in the
30's thought of as quaint elderly people ('one's grandmother' occurs
frequently!). Chemical medicine had already taken over with the
introduction of patent medicines, as well as new synthetics-- including
the precursors of aspirin-- through the end of the 19th century. (We
really don't realize, today, how much the introduction of a pill one could
take for a fever or headache has changed our society.)

Advances in synthetic drug production in the 40's, 50's, etc seem to have
almost put paid to herbalism in the US, until the tail end of the
back-to-the-land movement and the health fads of the late 70s reversed the
process. 

Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.

"You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away 
from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in 
your power-- he's free again." -- A. Solzhenitsyn   

============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.