Green Pharmacy: The History and Evolution of Western Herbal Medicine [Paperback]
Author: Barbara Griggs | Language: English | ISBN: 0892817275 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Green Pharmacy: The History and Evolution of Western Herbal Medicine
Direct download links available Green Pharmacy: The History and Evolution of Western Herbal Medicine [Paperback] for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Direct download links available Green Pharmacy: The History and Evolution of Western Herbal Medicine [Paperback] for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Including the latest developments in the field of herbal medicine, this classic bestseller presents a fascinating account of the ideas, personalities, advances, and vicissitudes that have shaped the course of medicine and pharmacology in the Western world. The author provides an eloquent and engaging account of the use of herbal medicine from prehistoric times to the present, reaffirming the incalculable value of medicinal plants in the healing arts. She presents a strong case for the cyclical emergence of alternative medicine at times (such as our own) when allopathic methods of treatment have lost their safety and efficacy.
Direct download links available for Green Pharmacy: The History and Evolution of Western Herbal Medicine - Paperback: 448 pages
- Publisher: Healing Arts Press; 3 edition (October 1, 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0892817275
- ISBN-13: 978-0892817276
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #474,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Anyone who has an interest in the development of medicine, philosophy of healing, or the politics of who is allowed to heal and why, cannot help but be uplifted and angered by this book.
Barbara Griggs is an excellent writer, and she has given a clear and sobering account of mankind's relationship with medicinal plants from pre-history. She looks at developments of a philosophy of healing, and charts the unfortunate history of conflicts between those who sought to empower their patients, and to demystify healing (often a female tradition) and those who sought to make a lot of money out of 'healing'. This latter group had a vested interest in making 'healing' something which only they could 'do' for someone else, and therefore the methods of healing had to be difficult, rare, costly - and often downright dangerous.
She contrasts the philosophy of herbalists such as Nicholas Culpeper and his use of 'simples' with apothecaries who were using a whole range of far flung exotic substances, often engaged in 'heroic' practices such as bleeding, purging, cupping etc.
There is a sobering account of the outlawing of herbal treatment in the UK during part of the twentieth century - and of course many many parallels to be drawn between the earlier conflicts between 'wise women/'witch' herbal practitioners and 'educated' professionals with often some pretty newfangled, untried remedies - and the modern conflicts between herbal medicines and the big pharmaceutical giants.
Parallels suggested themselves between the vilifying of herbal practitioners by the 'professionals' with their new 'mainstream' use of mercury and arsenic in large (not homeopathic doses) in the 17th/18th century which often killed the patient, and, today's big pharma.
Barbara Griggs is described on the back cover of the book as a "renowned journalist and researcher in the field of herbalism."
She wrote in the Introduction to this 1981 book, "In the mid-1970s, when I began to work on this book there was already a widespread and genuine revival of public interest in that medicine which we call herbal... How did it happen that almost from one century the next, medicinal plants were officially consigned to near-oblivion? What were the professional, or economic, or social forces that brought this about? ... could it be that we are neglecting a therapeutic resource of immense potential? These were some of the questions that arose in my mind as I read my way into the subject: I have tried to answer them in this book... I am also aware that this book risks being read as a wholesale attack on the medical profession, although this was far from my intention."
Here are some additional quotations from the book:
"In the grave of Neanderthal man, in a cave in Iraq, grains of flower pollens were found thickly scattered in the soil surrounding his bones... the pollens were identified as coming from eight different genera of flowering plants ... Of these eight species, seven are still used for medicine in dozens of different ways by the local people." (Pg. 5)
"(Samuel) Thomson's simplicity of theory - 'cold ... is the cause of all disease' - earned him the contemptuous scorn of the Regulars, who dismissed him as an illiterate empiric." (Pg. 165)
"By 1813 homeopathy had become a force to be reckoned with in Germany - homeopaths were highly successful at treating the typhoid fever that Napoleon's tattered remnant of an army brought back with them from Moscow.
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