the.com/herbalism
Medicine before pharma, and sometimes after it stops returning your calls.
means The practice of using plants and plant extracts to prevent or treat illness.
from Herb traces back to Latin 'herba,' meaning grass or green plant, which passed through Old French into Middle English. The '-ism' suffix, borrowed from Greek, turns the plant into a whole system of practice and belief. The word itself is humble botany; the authority it carries comes entirely from how long humans have been doing it before anyone called it 'medicine.'
- origin
- predates written language by millennia
- aspirin ancestor
- willow bark, chewed by ancient sufferers
- dose matters
- foxglove heals hearts or stops them
- modern irony
- forty percent of drugs still plant derived