Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

‘A New Herball: Wherein are contained the names of herbs in
Greek, Latin, English, Dutch, French, and in the apothecaries and
Herbaries Latin, with the properties, degrees and natural places of
the same. A new herbal, wherin are contained the names of herbs...’
(London: imprinted by Steven Myerdman and solde by John Gybken,
1551) is the first part of Turner’s great work; the second was
published in 1562 and the third in 1568, by Arnold Birckman of
Antwerp. It was mainly copied from Leonhart Fuchs’s 1542 ‘De
Historia Stirpium’ [Concerning the history of the families of plants]
Cologne. (Chapman & Tweddle, 1995). Turner like many other
herbalists gave credit to his predecessors: Pliny, Theophrastus,
Dioscorides and Galen.
White hellebore: ‘tells us, that in his time it was an ordinary receipt
among good wives, to give hellebore in powder to ii.d. weight, and he
is not much against it. But they do commonly exceed, for who so
bold as blind Bayard 91 and prescribe it by pennyworths, and such
irrational ways, as I have heard myself market folks ask for it in an
apothecary’s shop: but with what success God knows; they smart
often for their rash boldness and folly, break a vein, make their eyes
ready to start out of their heads, or kill themselves.’
Poppy: ‘If a man takes too much it will kill him ... He that has eaten
opium has a great sluggishness and a disposition to sleep and all the
body is encumbered with a sore itch.’
Mandragora: ‘Because this has diverse ways, taken is very
jeopardous for a man, it may kill him if he eat it, or drink it, out of
measure, and have no remedy for it… Mandraga be taken out of
measure, by and by sleep ensues and a great lowering of strength
with a forgetfulness.’
1571 Petrus Severinus, physician to the Danish king, wrote that the effects
of antimony were ‘Vomare, cacare, sudare’ (to vomit, to defecate, to
sweat) [Severinus, 1571].
1573 Fioravanti L complained to the authorities and added ‘that there be
consigned to me alone twenty-five sick people with diverse ailments
and an equal number with the same information to all the physicians
of Milan, and if I don’t cure mine faster and better than they do I am
willing to be banished forever from this city.’
1564–1616 Shakespeare, as one would expect, mentions herbal treatment and
its adverse effects:
91 Bayard = an old blind horse