don Dispensatory of 1649, William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine of 1769 and
other books that sought to break the secrecy cultivated by the physicians and
make the best-available medical guidance accessible to the populace in gen-
eral may well have furthered the process. Information probably moved in
both directions, from country to city and vice versa.Robert Boyle produced
his Medicinal Experiments of 1692 ‘chiefly for the use of those that live in the
Country, in Places where Physicians are scarce, if at all to be had, especially by
Poor People’; John Wesley’s more famous Primitive Physic of 1747 was writ-
ten expressly from that motive, too. By the eighteenth century the itinerant
chapman with his stock of books that so often included a herbal had become
a familiar figure in rural areas. The long-established trade of gathering herbs
from the wild for sale in city markets or to apothecaries and druggists also
began to expand to such proportions that it constituted a major threat to the
local survival of some plant species as well as a serious nuisance to the own-
ers of the land on which they grew.
The influences for change within folk medicine were gathering pace. As
land enclosure led to increased rural poverty and migration to cities and
towns, communities and their traditions were fragmented. Massive emigra-
tions to North America increased this fragmentation, especially of the rural
traditions of Scotland and Ireland. For the Irish, the physical severance from
country ways that resulted was so abrupt and wholesale that their traditional
herbal lore must inevitably have been largely forgotten. The Scots, on the
other hand, had some chance of preserving their traditional herbal remedies
in rural eastern Canada, where the native flora was fairly similar to the one
they had left behind. The early colonists in North America had taken a selec-
tion of herbs along with them, but because many of them came from urban
Britain, that selection could have been drawn only in part at best from the
folk medical tradition.
Even before the nineteenth century, British folk medicine had lost much
of its diversity. The folk uses of many plants recorded by sixteenth- and sev-
enteenth-century writers were not heard of again. If so much had been lost so
early, then what was lost subsequently must have been great indeed.
Ye t the story has not been entirely one of loss. Uses of the more versatile
herbs have proliferated, though on what scale it is hard to tell with such
incomplete records. Additional herbs were also brought into service. Two
that were demonstrably recruited since 1860 feature in the following pages:
pineapple-weed,Matricaria discoidea,and Hottentot-fig,Carpobrotus edulis
and C. acinaciformis,natives respectively of north-eastern Asia and South
24 Herbs Without the Herbals