Native Healers. Anita Ralph
According to Hildegard of Bingen, disease is not a process, but an absence of process, a failing in the course of nature. Thus, from a holistic perspective, the presence of disease suggests a shortfall that can be improved upon. Her works describe over 2000 herb recipes, as well as ways of eating, and Hildegarde also had advice on wellness and living, that is regarded as a forerunner to the strong tradition of herbal medicine and naturopathy in Germany, and Northern Europe. These can be translated as:
•Viriditas—The drawing of energy from nature's ‘greenness’ and life force.
•Healthy and balanced nutrition found from the healing power of food.
•Regeneration of strained nerves with healthy sleep and dream regulation.
•Finding the harmonious balance between work and leisure.
•Removal of waste products and purification with regular fasting and sweat baths.
•Optimism of mind and strength of psychological defences.
Monastic preservation of medical texts provided an intellectual starting point for the study of medicine or physic in the first universities. In Padua, Salerno, Bologna, Oxford and throughout Europe, medicine was taught and pharmacy was demonstrated in the physic garden—some of these physic gardens remain open to visitors today.
Another contributor from this time was the medical practitioner and scholar Trotula—we do not know her full name. There are three books largely attributed to her that also contain new ideas for the time about health, and about women's health and wellbeing.5
The Christian requirement for charity throughout the Middle Ages was expressed in the formation of hospitality for pilgrims, and thus the formation of ‘spittals’ or ‘hospitals’, which cared for and treated those in need.
Medico-archaeology such as that at Soutra Aisle close to the Scottish border, reveals the use of medicinal plants on a large scale (as well as other medical interventions of the time such as blood-letting). Archaeological evidence found at Soutra Aisle, such as well-preserved seeds of Valeriana officinalis L. and Hypericum perforatum L. (still formed into a bolus), has been linked to contemporary 12th-century recipes in manuscripts from around the time of the hospital such as ‘The armpit package of St Columba’ a possible remedy for swollen lymph glands made from these plants.6
As the printing press took over from handwritten manuscripts, herbals began to be printed and circulated. An extraordinary number of herbals are still available to us today and many of them repeat and elaborate on information from existing or even long lost manuscripts. The popularity of herbals has ensured the survival of many for our continued enjoyment and learning. Familiar names include: John Gerard, Nicholas Culpeper, William Turner and John Parkinson.7
Two types of herbal knowledge existed; Latin texts for those wealthy enough to be educated, and secondly, a folk tradition, often in the form of practical medicine infused with some exotic remedies from Latin texts right alongside native and local plants. In the UK, some resources survive, often in the form of recipes, of the people's everyday herbalism. For example recipes from Wales and the physicians of Myddfai,8 and 20th-century information collected from the country folk of England9,10 and Scotland.11
One significantly negative outcome from this period of history in Europe was the witch-hunt genocide (gendercide). In Europe during the Middle Ages, many women (and some men) were persecuted supposedly for being witches. It has been regularly suggested that many of these so-called witches who were put to death, were in fact herbalists or simply people offering other people healing or midwifery services. The link between herbalists and witchcraft is still resonant today—albeit jokingly.2 A brief read of the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches) by Heinrich Kramer in 1487—the work that sparked the notorious witch trials of Europe and early settlers of America, reveals a far more sinister misogyny at work.
Matilda Joslyn Gage, suffragette, has said that
The persecution of witches had nothing to do with fighting evil or resisting the devil—it was simply entrenched misogyny, the goal of which was to repress the intellect of women. A witch was not wicked, did not ride a broomstick naked in the dark nor consort with demons. She was instead likely to be a woman of superior intellect.
—Matilda Joslyn Gage
As a thought experiment Matilda suggested that for ‘witches’ we should instead read ‘women’, for their histories run hand in hand.
The witch trials had undoubtedly a suppressive effect on a living tradition of plant medicine throughout Northern Europe, and continues to lend an unfortunate negative association with herbal medicine and women healers.
Wealthy and literate women of the 16th–19th centuries continued to keep and record recipes for food, medicine and medicinal foods, for use within the home. Meanwhile paid professionals went on to create and protect the title of doctor, leading to the formation of medical societies.
The steady development of chemistry as a profession enabled the evolution of a whole new area of drug development, which orthodox medicine fully embraced. However, plant-based medicines were still recommended as part of the pharmacopoeia well into the 20th century. The British Pharmacopoeia of 1932 lists ointment of capsicum, gum of tragacanth, tincture of ginger, tincture of valerian, common tincture of rhubarb, and tinctures of myrrh, gentian, quassia and lobelia, to name just a few. The British Pharmaceutical Codex of 1954 included tincture of lemon, squill, rose fruit, rosemary oil, and peppermint in its list of recommended substances for medicines. The British National Formulary (BNF) of 2016 still includes peppermint oil as one of its recommendations, among a list of medicines that are otherwise overwhelmingly mono-chemical in nature.
During the 19th century, the success of the American Botanical Movement led to the formation of the National Association of Medical Herbalists (NAMH) in the UK in 1864, eventually becoming the National Institute of Medical Herbalists (NIMH).
Coat of Arms, National Institute of Medical Herbalists.
There is acknowledgement (as can be seen from the former coat of arms of the NIMH pictured here), that the corpus of knowledge from the ancient and new worlds has informed what we today call modern herbal medicine, and phytotherapy. It also represents the strong connection to and yet difference from, conventional medical origins.
The influence from America cannot be underestimated. The pio-neers from the old world had to live and survive in the unfamiliar newly settled lands of America. The survival of these early settlers can be seen as a direct result of First Nations peoples’ knowledge of medicine and medicinal plants. Many European settlers were helped by them, then they copied and formalised herbal medicine techniques from those native peoples of Canada, and of North and South America. This new influence upon European herbal medicine set in motion a clear distinction between conventional and herbal medicine, and a revival in the use of plant medicines in contrast to the growing popularity of chemical medicines among most professional doctors.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, use of bleeding, mercury, opiates, arse-nic, emetics and purgatives by regular doctors in America and Britain often resulted in the death of the patient. This influenced the creation of a strong alternative medicine system, which borrowed heavily from First Nations’ sweat baths, herbal practice, and also from New England folk remedies.
Samuel Thomson (1769–1843), a New Hampshire farmer, formalised his system of medicine that was similarly ‘heroic’ but much less toxic and extreme than the current conventional options, and relied on medicinal plants. The principle that ‘heat is life and cold is death’ was behind a simple system of steaming and purging remedies, and the use of many herbs familiar to Western herbalists today such as chilli, ginger, prickly ash bark, yarrow, lobelia, bayberry, skullcap and boneset can be traced back to Thompsonian medicine.12
Thompson's original theory was later supplanted