[LMB] AKICIF: herbology OT:

[Tracy MacShane]

On Mon, July 10, 2006 11:23 am, CatMtn at aol.com wrote:
>
> In a message dated 7/9/2006 7:33:18 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> tadler at yeshivanet.com writes:
>
>>  Both the leaves, bark, and the seed, are used to stanch bleeding of
>>  wounds, and at mouth and nose, spitting of blood, and other fluxes of
>>  blood in man or woman, <snip>
>
>
> M:
>
> This is a bit puzzling, as aspirin is a blood thinner, and willow  (Salix)
> contains salicylates, which are aspirin.  It would seem to me  that they
> would
> stop clotting, not bleeding.
>
> Mary

That was me, quoting from Culpeper. And I suspect the basis of that
particular statement of his was that willow bark is extremely bitter to
taste. Bitter=astringent=slows bleeding (not really, in *their* minds at
the time).

Also, bloodletting was used as a "cure" for excessive nosebleeds, ulcers
and the like for centuries.

As Marna says, please don't take Culpeper as gospel! One of the reasons
they invented homeopathy (no snarkage please, I'm a qualified homeopath)
was that for the first time, homeopaths *took the substance* they were
"proving" as a medicine in a systematic way to enumerate all its effects.
Modern pharamacology has a historical debt to the development of that
method.

Before then, "testing" drugs was a matter of seeing if you were
out-and-out poisoned by it, seeing where the substance fitted according to
alchemical theory or whatever philosophical school you belonged to said,
which of the "humors" it addressed, what Galen or Aristotle might have
written about it (or other Greek or Arabic scholars, who weren't in for
testing/observation either, just theorising), and such logic as "bitter =
effective".

The initial theory for the effectiveness of chicona bark for malaria was
just that - it tasted extremely bitter. No more or no less. That
particular bark was so effective that it pushed along the idea of
researching *why* a substance worked as it did, and led to the idea of
refining herbs to get to their "active" ingredient (ie. quinine from the
chicona).