This is the place in the Herbarium where we offer personal reflections, observations and snippets of information that don’t warrant a full article. Everybody can join in, (use the ‘Comments’ box at the bottom of the ‘Blogservations’ file) but please keep faith with the core values of the Herbarium. We won’t, for instance, accept personal political rants or questions about herbal treatments – there are enough herbal chatrooms for such purposes already.
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Carol & I celebrated the Herbarium’s 50,000 hits with a bottle or two of Elderflower Champagne, made to Nathalie’s excellent recipe. It was delicious, with a slight hint of Lychees in the flavour, wickedly alcoholic… and no hangover!
It occurred to us in our cups how fitting it all was – something learnt from our own close herbal friends that we can enjoy and in turn share with others. There’s a point to be made that it doesn’t matter if you’re a practitioner or not, whether you’re teaching or learning or just mildly interested, everybody can take it into their own homes and live the Life Herbal. You can make your own beverages (alcoholic or not), seasonings, salad dressings & preserves, you can fill yourself with superfoods from gardening and foraging, your can make your own cosmetics, toiletries, furniture polish, insect repellant, you can treat your own animals, you can make your own Christmas presents of candied Angelica or Rose chocolates, and so on and so on.
This is a homely approach to using herbs that has always been there, (if less popular than in better times) – it’s enormous fun, deeply fulfilling, economically good sense, helps us tread lightly on the earth, and keeps us in intimate contact with the plant world as we follow it through the seasons. If anybody’s getting too bogged down with all the hard, mechanistic stuff being thrown at herbal practitioners at the moment, go out and gather some Marigold, Lavender, Borage, Cherries, Blackcurrants (to mention but a few that are in season in this earlier-than-usual summer) and make something wickedly self-indulgent with them. It’ll make you feel so much better.
Stephen & Carol
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The History of Medicine
2000 BC: Here, eat this root.
1000 AD: That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.
1800 AD: That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1940 AD: That potion is snake oil. Here, take this pill.
1985 AD: That pill is ineffective. Here, take this antibiotic.
2011 AD: That antibiotic doesn’t work any more. Here, eat this root.
The Herbarium 
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June 10, 2011 at 9:42 am
Anthony Levy
Hi, I was just reading an ancient article from J. Royal Soc Medicine 1989. At the end of my photocopy there is a half a piece titled ‘Genetic Iron Overload’, about Haemochromatosis, a genetic disorder causing excessive iron absorption and consequent overload. It says ‘The rate of accumulation of iron in genetically susceptible individuals varies enormously and cannot be explained solely on the basis of increased iron absorption and dietary exposure to iron’.
I don’t know what has happened in the field since then, but would like to suggest that this inherent variability, over and above that allowed for by a ‘hard’ genetic disease, is the sort of realm that herbal medicine ought to be able to tackle, potentially moving people from the severe end to the mild end.
Edward Tick wrote an interesting book, ‘The Practice of Greek Dream Healing’, where he describes his experiences taking people to Greece to dream in the ancient healing temples. One story is Dave, who has Haemochromatosis. His condition has deteriorated and he needs blood taking off every week or two. In Dave’s dream, he meets an old friend, with whom he had a major argument. In the dream they resolve the issues, and part as friends. After this his condition improves substantially, and his need for blood drainage goes down to once in three months.
What interests me about this is the liver. Haemochromatosis affects the liver, and anger is a liver emotion in TCM. So could herbs have had the same effect, clearing the liver?