Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland by David E. Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield, Timber Press, 拢22.50/$29.95, ISBN 0881926388 Reviewed by Roy Ellen
ETHNOBOTANY conjures images of faraway places 鈥� unless you live in the Amazon, of course. The term was supposedly coined by John Harshberger in Philadelphia in 1895. In 1919 Michael Moloney published what he called his 鈥渆thnobotany鈥� 鈥� of Ireland. But by the time the scientific study of ethnobotany was fully established, in the final decades of the 20th century, European folk plant medicines were widely regarded as lost, wholly replaced by synthetic drugs.
Gabrielle Hatfield, who is a research associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and field botanist David Allen have demonstrated that we can still discover much about the contemporary and recent medicinal use of plants in the British Isles.
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Their book is about local oral knowledge of plant cures. This oral knowledge has no doubt acquired much from the written tradition over the years, as well as from introduced plants and medicine. But herbalists such as John Gerard and Nicholas Culpeper reflected a wider European tradition and medical philosophy, while the oral remedies display an authenticity derived from local circumstances and constant experimentation.
This is an extraordinary work, which organises what we know on a systematic taxonomic basis, evaluates the accuracy of numerous individual records, and provides tantalising glimpses of what might be learned from studying the distribution of the remedies. There can be no doubt whatsoever that it will quickly establish itself as the premier reference on its subject.