upon their owne hombred and country plants.’^4 Most people did not have
this choice; they had to use their own home-bred remedies or nothing.
Bythe seventeenth century a few were questioning the advisability of tak-
ing such profoundly alien remedies. The poet George Herbert warned the
country parson and his wife to steer clear of the ‘outlandish gums’ of the city
and seek their remedies in their gardens and fields, ‘for home-bred medicines
are both more easy for the parsons purse, and more familiar for all mens
bodyes.’^5 Insuch protests an element of national pride is detectable as well.
William Coles inThe Art of Simplingheld the maidenhair of Britain,Adi-
antum capillus-veneris?, ‘never a whit inferior to the Assyrian’, just as ‘our
Gentian is as good as that which is brought from beyond sea’ and ‘our Angel-
ica... as that of Norway and Ireland [Iceland?]’.^6 Some believed that the
rearrangement of nature caused by importing plants was going against Divine
intention. This point was well made in an ‘advertisement’ inserted by Thomas
Johnson (1636) by way of a postscript to his edition of Gerard’s Herball:
I verily believe that the divine Providence had a care in bestowing
plants in each part of the earth, fitting and convenient to the fore-
knowne necessities of the future inhabitants; and if wee throughly
knew the vertues of these, we needed no Indian nor American drugges.^7Johnson could be accused of self-interest in advancing this view since his
uniquely extensive first-hand knowledge of Britain’s native flora was now in
danger of being rendered obsolete. However, his opinion was probably hon-
estly held.
Ironically, the discovery of such an unsuspected diversity of valuable
plant-based drugs in distant parts of the world eventually led to the notion
that Britain’s own little-known hinterland might have something of the same
kind to offer as well. To this extent the alien influx had a beneficial side effect.
Folk medicine was at last to be taken seriously in progressive learned quarters.
The first sign of this major change of heart was the dispatching in 1695 of
Martin Martin on a general research inspection of Scotland’s Western Isles. A
resident of that region as factor to the laird of Macleod, Martin owed this
commission to some leading figures in the then-burgeoning Scottish Enlight-
enment in Edinburgh, one of whom, Archibald Pitcairne, ensured that
enquiring about remedies in use was included in the brief. Martin’s consci-
entious, refreshingly non-judgemental coverage of that aspect in his subse-
quent report is outstanding in its value today, not just on account of its early
date but also because most of the remedies he came across appear to have
Herbs Without the Herbals 19