MEDICINAL PLANTS in Folk Tradition - Killerwall.net

chapter 1 Herbs Without the Herbals 21
not always for reasons that one might suppose. Flora Sarisburiensis, for
instance, was produced by the head of the Salisbury Infirmary, Henry Smith,
from a notion that was unashamedly economic: ‘Every saving of expensive
medicines in hospital practice is in these days important, and particularly so
when an equally efficacious and much cheaper [one] can be introduced.’ 9
There were substitutes to be had for free in the countryside round about, and
the primary purpose of his book was to stimulate their collection by enabling
some of the more useful ones to be identified.
That favourable trend was massively reinforced by the Apothecaries’ Act
of 1815, which required all medical students wishing to be licenced to practise
in England or Wales—and thus comprising many graduates of Scottish
medical schools as well—to pass an exam that included a test of herbal
knowledge. The act established botany firmly within the medical curriculum
and for at least a generation afterwards produced a good many practitioners
who retained that subject as a hobby, especially if they went to live in
a country area. Some of these naturally made a note of the rustic remedies
they encountered, resulting in local lists of exceptional value because of their
above-average botanical precision. The publications of Dr George Johnston
on Berwickshire are doubly valuable in view of the shortage of herbal information
for the whole of lowland Scotland. Several of his counterparts in rural
Ireland, where folk cures were particularly prominent, also made noteworthy
contributions—as indeed country doctors have continued to do, in Britain as
well, long after the disappearance of botany from the medical curricula.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw a complementary surge of
lay interest in what till then had passed under the name of ‘popular antiquities’,
part of a wider antiquarianism that had led up to the Romantic Movement
and been boosted by that. By 1846 that interest was sufficiently widespread
and distinctive to have ‘folk-lore’ coined for it. 10 The field collecting of
the folklorists in the decades that followed was unsystematic and rarely
informed by much botanical knowledge, but it served to show that the number
of remedies still surviving, if only in the memories of the aged, was very
much greater than generally supposed. Unfortunately, though, there were no
moves to collate all the data for Britain and Ireland, as Hewett Cottrell Watson
and his imitators were doing so impressively in several branches of natural
history. Thus the mass of information collected was deprived of effect by
remaining fragmentary and, too often, by being published obscurely. It was
not until the 1930s, and then only in Ireland, that the first large-scale systematic
survey at a national level was carried out.