the medical profession today as conclusive.Most of the claims made for them
will remain unproven until more work is done or new approaches formu-
lated. On the whole, those claims are in any case hardly extravagant ones. At
a common-sense level, who will want to disbelieve that members of the mint
family, the Lamiaceae, contain substances that ease coughing, for example?
Or how can anyone reasonably question that such a readily observable effect
as an increased flow of urine resulting from eating the leaves of dandelions
(Taraxacum officinale) or the young tops of broom (Cytisus scoparius)? But as
the detailed practical instructions for gathering and preparing the remedies
have in many cases been lost, misinterpretations can and do arise. Herbs
boiled for too long or stored in the wrong conditions can lose their potency.
Individual plants within a species may vary in their chemical constituents
with the type of environment, the season and even the time of day. Most spe-
cies have genetically distinct populations as well, another source of chemical
variation.
Patients, too, have their individual reactions: where some are hypersensi-
tive, others may be immune. Some medicines, particularly herbal ones, work
too subtly and slowly to convince the impatient of their effectiveness and are
discontinued prematurely. Many minor illnesses are self-limiting, and the
results of any treatment may in these cases be irrelevant. Symptoms can come
and go regardless of any cures claimed for them; warts, for example, may
eventually disappear with or without any intervention. Above all, there is the
placebo effect: faith in the treatment itself may help effect a cure, especially if
it includes a prescribed element of ritual, such as reciting a familiar prayer
backwards or wearing some substance in a bag about one’s person.
Because of all these uncertainties, deliberately little is said about this
aspect in these pages. That a remedy is mentioned should not be taken as
endorsement of its effectiveness. Similarly, the mention of a particular ail-
ment does not imply any judgement as to the accuracy of the diagnosis; it is
merely what the person relating or recording it supposed it to be. Given the
looseness of folk terminology, attempting to bring that into line with mod-
ern medical usage is too full of pitfalls to be a sensible procedure in most
cases. An exception has been made for obsolete terms that have unambiguous
modern equivalents: ‘chincough’ has been translated into whooping cough
(pertussis), for instance, and ‘St Anthony’s fire’ into erysipelas.
Plant identifications are a further major source of uncertainties. Users of
country remedies do not make such fine distinctions as botanists, so related
species that look broadly similar—most of the St John’s-worts (Hypericum),
26 Herbs Without the Herbals