fallen into disuse during the following century. In 1772 the Rev. John Light-
foot, who accompanied the non-botanical Thomas Pennant on his tour of
much the same region, came back with a much more slender haul, confirm-
ing Martin’s information in only one or two respects (though admittedly,
medicine was not his primary interest). Though there were to be no compa-
rably ambitious expeditions in which the noting of folk remedies was a sig-
nificant feature, the precedent had been set for making at least some mention
of these in the many accounts of gentlemen’s tours to various parts of Britain
that thereafter became a publishing vogue.
Meanwhile on the international scene it was becoming increasingly fash-
ionable in medical circles to investigate some of the long-disdained herbs of
the backwoods, in the hope that there might after all be at least a kernel of
truth in their claims to cure. Advances in chemical knowledge provided a
spur to this. In 1746, bemoaning that so few of his fellow practitioners ‘now
know the common virtues of our own herbs’, a Sheffield physician, Thomas
Short, published a treatise expressly for their benefit on those herbal species
‘generally to be found in the fields or gardens in Great-Britain’.^8 Ye t it was
not a member of that profession at all but a country parson, the Rev. Thomas
Stone, who ten years later brought to medical attention the properties of a
species of willow,Salix alba,and opened up the path that would lead even-
tually to the multi-purpose aspirin. It is ironic, too, that this discovery and the
even more epoch-making one by William Withering that followed twenty
years later were both made in the English Midlands, virtually on the back-
doorstep of the College of Physicians. Withering’s confirming of the folk rep-
utation long enjoyed by the foxglove,Digitalis purpurea,as a remedy for heart
trouble was an historic addition to the armoury of orthodox medicine. And
it could not have been achieved had Withering not been alert to the possibil-
ity already and possessed the necessary training and insight for the lengthy
series of experiments that transformed a hunch into proof. He might not
have made the discovery in the first place had he not taken up botany as a
leisure pursuit some five or six years earlier. Just as important in this context
is the fact that the three-volume, widely bought manual on Britain’s flower-
ing plants that he went on to produce had observations on their medical
potential as one of its notable features.
Thanks particularly to Withering, and to the fashionable interest in
botany among the cultivated classes at that period, at least some mention of
the folk usage of appropriate species became de rigueur in published cata-
logues of the wild flora. Several of those had doctors for their authors—and
20 Herbs Without the Herbals