Native Healers. Anita Ralph
healers, the title of this book, refers to healing plants that exist in ecological niches across the planet. The term ‘native healers’ also resonates with the archaic tradition of herbalism and the wisdom passed down by our ancestors. ‘Native healers’ could also refer to you—by connecting with plant medicines and using what grows locally to you to help and heal yourself and your loved ones you are a native healer—thriving in nature!
Practising forms of medicine which are not considered to be biomedicine in the conventional sense can, on the surface, seem to be a daunting proposition for many of us. Herbal medicine is not part of mainstreamfunded medicine here in the UK, and this can be used to imply that state-funded healthcare is the only bone-fide medicine. Unlike many other countries this artificial polarity sometimes leads to misunderstanding about herbal medicine. It can feel as if we are operating in opposition to current medical thinking. Under the surface, however, lie rich streams of knowledge and wisdom to carry us forward.
One of the central aims of this book is to provide a source of knowledge which forms the basis of the counter-current mentioned above; a source of complementary knowledge that in fact offers a fundamentally useful system of medicine to complement conventional biomedicine. Of central importance is the opportunity to offer help to those that have not been helped by conventional biomedicine. Equipped with this knowledge we can then progress with ease along the paths of our individual rivers, navigating potential obstacles and opposing energies with more assurance and finesse, to finally reach the transformative pool of healing wisdom that awaits us all.
This book reaches out to herbalists, health care professionals and all those interested in healing, and bridges the gap between thinking of plant medicines as simply ‘natural’ drugs, and across into the rich landscape of herbalists’ ideas: ideas about the human body and how we function, and how plants might contribute positively to that dynamism.
We are from the Earth, and so are the plants that heal us.
Anita Ralph and Mary Tassell, 2019
Reference
1Carr-Gomm, P. and S. Carr-Gomm, Druid Animal Oracle. 2007: Connections Book Publishing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would love to very enthusiastically thank the following people for all their help and support with the production of this book: Heartwood—an organization that is truly in the right place, at the right time for providing fertile ground for the establishment of the Foundation Course in Western Herbal Medicine, that is also the foundation for this book -It's founders, its tutors and its students, all are inspirational. Especially to Paul and Frances Hambly and Nic Rowley, for their invitation for us to be involved at all we owe a debt of gratitude. To Aeon, our bright and brilliant publishers, for their unerring guidance and enthusiasm. To Tony Smith for his help with diagrams, annotation of images, and the design of our cover. To Annette Hughes for providing beautiful plant drawings, and Bee McGovern for her botanical accuracy and photograph of chamomile. To Stephen Buhner for kind permission to use his poem, and to Henriette Kress for her incredible resource of old herbals and her help in sourcing botanical illustrations. To Ian Lawrence and John Tassell for being themselves—truly vital for so many reasons. Love and blessings to you all.
INTRODUCTION
Context: Introducing herbal medicine
Herbal medicine must have been there right at the very beginning of human history. Our ancestors were deeply embedded in the landscape in a way that is difficult to imagine for us modern humans. Innately, we must have used herbal medicine. Consider the complex meanings and significance to the earliest people, of animals, birds, trees and plants, when these things provided everything—all shelter, food, clothing and tools; it is less problematic then to see how knowledge of plant medicine will have begun very early indeed.
Animals are known to use plants as medicine.1 Many recorded examples exist, and substantiation for Neanderthal medicinal plant use has recently been demonstrated by archaeologists.2 Humans will have witnessed and copied the behaviours of other-than-human-beings, as we know we copied them in hunting and other skills. Consider also, the fact that we are animals, and therefore this instinct to track down and identify healing substances from the natural world is innate to us. We are a product of our environment, and that environment (until very recent times) has always been the natural world.
Definition—Native: Belonging inherently, and thriving innately, in nature.
In the world of information technology it denotes software, data, etc., that is specifically designed for the system on which it is run.
Native healers—those local plants with a capacity to heal reliably—will have been learned by our emergent species. At some point, human native healers, specialised in keeping and sharing knowledge of healing plants, will have begun a lineage that can still be found in all remaining native peoples, and even in technological societies today, all over our beautiful Earth.
Herbal medicine has been utilised in every inhabited continent on the planet, and has been adapted and updated as civilisations have progressed, and as our understanding of human physiology, and understanding of our relationship to the environment, has increased. Many sophisticated herbal medicine systems with ancient origins still exist and are utilised alongside any conventional biomedicine that may now be practised. Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tibetan, Unani Tibb and many others have functioning educational institutions and practitioners in our modern world. The World Health Organization (WHO) recognises herbal medicine as the major form of healthcare for over 60% of the world's population.3
The focus of this book is partly an exploration of the fundamental usefulness of plants for healing to all people whatever their training or skills. Plants have been utilised as healing food and medicine by families and in homes across the world, and they can still play an important role today. We introduce recipes and strategies for using herbal medicine as kitchen pharmacy and home first aid throughout this book.
The focus of this book is also partly upon the professional practice of herbal medicine by the medical herbalists of the European tradition and, in particular, those of the UK in the 21st century. In Europe the term for medical herbalist is more usually phytotherapist, and phytotherapy refers to the subject of modern herbal medicine more broadly. Modern Western herbal medicine/phytotherapy has multiple and global origins, but is also intimately linked with the development of modern conventional biomedical science.
Definition—Phytotherapy: Phyto comes to us from the Greek, and means ‘derived from or pertaining to plants’. Therapy also comes to us from Ancient Greece and means ‘curing or healing’.
Medical herbalists do not use plants as direct alternatives to synthetic drugs however. The fundamental principles of Western herbal medicine lie in the recognition of the unity of the body-mind, and in the core principles of the restoration of dynamic function and enhancing the resilience of our physiology. By acknowledging complexity and interconnectedness, and by directing herbal medicine strategies at these root causes, the herbalist aims to help others re-build that resilience and help restore health and wellbeing.3 We explore these concepts in more detail in this book.
Note: The word health is used here in its original meaning: health derived from the Old English haelth, meaning ‘whole’.
Modern Western medical herbalists seek to combine up-to-date scientific advances in the study of physiology and medicine with everything that is known about medicinal plants in order to apply plant therapy to aid the dynamic ecosystem of the body to actively restore and balance function and resilience. In fact, Western medical herbalists exist as a result of a unique historical context whereby Europe became a melting pot of ideas derived from revived manuscripts of the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman worlds, from localised folk medicine and mediaeval monastic practice, through to the American botanical movement and its significant influence on herbalists in Britain. The effect of the plant medicines arriving in the UK and Europe from