CHAPTER 1 HerbsWithout the Herbals: Retracing a Lost Tradition
Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An Ethnobotany of Britain & Ireland arose
out of a conviction, arrived at by each of the authors independently, that the
history of Western medicine as usually recounted suffers from a serious dis-
tortion as far as the use of herbal remedies is concerned. Written on the
assumption that it is only through the study of surviving texts that the med-
ical practices of the past can be reconstructed, that history has been con-
ceived in terms of tracing the gradual diffusion of written knowledge from
the ancient civilisations around the shores of the Mediterranean. Because
the texts were originally written in Greek or Latin (though many had been
preserved in Arabic), it was the practices of the Classical world, seen through
these texts, on which historians concentrated. The story of the rise of West-
ern medicine has been carried forward through the herbals of the Dark Ages
to the eventual selective filtering of that received body of learning and its cul-
mination, after various false turnings, in the professional practices of today.
That version has two major flaws. The first is that it overlooks the fact
that the herbal expertise of the Classical world was based primarily on the
flora of the Mediterranean basin and its vicinity. The Greeks and Romans
had little or no knowledge of what grew in the colder and wetter parts of
Europe and probably saw few if any of the plants restricted to those different
climates. Away from the Mediterranean, their herbals consequently had at
best only a limited relevance, a fact which their successors were for many cen-
turies in no position to realise.
The second major flaw in that standard version of the history of Western
medicine is that it ignores the traditional use of local plant remedies on which