Abstract
THE lecture which commemorates annually Sir Edwin Chadwick, “the father of English sanitation”, was this year given at the Chelsea Physic Garden by Sir William Willcox on June 11. In choosing “Plant Pharmacology and Medical Practice” for his subject, Sir William might well have been excused from dealing with synthetic chemical medicaments; he nevertheless claimed as plant products “coal and coal tar with its myriads of derivatives”, a claim which suggests a perilous affinity between rhubarb and the barbiturates. It seems a strong thing to hold, as Sir William Willcox is prepared to do, that “plant products rarely act as tissue poisons because of their purity . . . (while) in the chemical laboratory the conditions are so different from those obtaining in Nature that by-products injurious to health always occur during any chemical synthesis”, and that “it is for this reason that so many of the modern artificially synthesised drugs are liver and tissue poisons: examples are cinchophen and similar derivatives”. Nevertheless, it is certain that if in recent years orthodox medicine has preferred the synthetic product of the laboratory, the public have turned in increasing measure to herbal remedies, and there has been a large increase in the numbers of herbal stores and in the trade in herbal medicines. The benefit derived from drinking several pints of hot water daily in the form of a tisane or decoction may be substantial, and certainly the danger of positive harm is minute compared with the results of uncontrolled resort to the tonics, sleeping-draughts, digestive pills and headache tablets which are a by-product of modern civilisation. The representative exhibition of medicinal plants shown at the lecture served to link the Physic Garden of to-day with its beginnings in the seventeenth century, when it supplied the apothecaries of London with those herbs which they failed to collect on their ‘herbarizing’ expeditions in the fields of Greenwich and Battersea.
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Plants and Medicine. Nature 137, 1023 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/1371023b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1371023b0