Africa which are known to have joined the wild flora of these islands some-
time after.
Such gains apart, however, the period since 1800 can hardly have been
kind to the folk tradition as far as Britain has been concerned (with Ireland
it has been a different matter). The eighteenth-century wave of new respect
for folk medicine as a repository of potential extra weapons in the armoury
of learned medicine failed to last. So many alternatives of proven value
poured in from all around the globe that searching so close to home no longer
seemed worth the effort. Though professional herbalism was sent under-
ground by legislation secured by the orthodox medical community, it soon
enjoyed a resurgence in the guise of physiomedicalism, a re-import from
North America (along with some North American plant usage). That was
too alien a development, however, to affect folk tradition significantly. Rus-
tic remedies consequently disappeared once again into obscurity, becoming
survivals from the past to be appreciated by the learned merely for their
quaintness. The national health services, providing free treatments of appar-
ent reliability and potency, finally brought to a rapid end what remained of a
living tradition.
The main purpose ofMedicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An Ethnobotany of
Britain & Ireland is to demonstrate that a large enough body of evidence has
survived to show that the folk medical tradition was impressively wide in its
botanical reach and equally impressive in the range of ailments it treated.
Many of the plants recorded within this tradition, even some of them that
were used over wide areas, do not appear in the herbals. This lends strong
support to the idea that the rural tradition retained much of its autonomy
through the centuries and was substantially self-sufficient.
Folk medicine had, of course, its limitations. The complaints treated on
the whole were necessarily relatively minor: coughs, colds, burns, skin com-
plaints, aches and pains, the staple of today’s doctor’s consulting room. Some
of its exponents could heal broken limbs, some would even treat tumours,
but few went as far as surgery. For all its limitations, however, folk medicine
does not deserve all the contempt heaped upon it by followers of learned
medicine. It probably did less harm overall, and may even have been more
effective, than all their bleeding and purging.
However, the effectiveness or otherwise of folk medicine is not a prof-
itable area for discussion. Hardly any of its remedies have yet been subjected
to randomised double-blind trials, the only testing method recognised by
Herbs Without the Herbals 25