Ancient Roots and the Herbalist's Way

The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them. — Ben Sira 38:4

The First Medicine

Before there were pharmacies, there were plants. Every people on earth has had its healers, and every one of them reached first for the leaves, roots, barks, seeds and flowers growing around them. Archaeologists have found yarrow and chamomile in the teeth of people who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Ötzi, the “Iceman” found frozen in the Alps after more than 5,000 years, carried birch polypore, a fungus still used against intestinal worms. Herbal medicine is not an alternative to medicine. For most of human history it simply was medicine, and the World Health Organization has long reported that a large share of the world’s people still rely on traditional, mostly plant-based, remedies today.

This chapter walks through the great herbal traditions, then teaches the vocabulary every herbalist uses, and ends with the safety rules that make herbs a blessing rather than a danger.

Herbs in Ancient Hebrew Wisdom

The Hebrew Scriptures open in a garden. “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed… to you it shall be for meat” (Genesis 1:29). The plants were given first as food, and the line between food and medicine was thin from the start. Ezekiel’s vision of the river flowing from the Temple ends with trees whose fruit is food “and the leaf thereof for medicine” (Ezekiel 47:12).

Many herbs you will meet in this book appear in those ancient pages:

• Hyssop (ezov) was the bundle of herbs used to sprinkle the doorposts at the first Passover and to cleanse people healed of skin disease. “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean” (Psalm 51:7). The ezov of the Bible was most likely the wild oregano of the land of Israel, Origanum syriacum, the herb in za’atar, a strong antiseptic. The European hyssop in Dr. Christopher’s syllabus is a cousin.
• Balm of Gilead (tsori) was a resin so famous for healing wounds that Jeremiah asked, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” (Jeremiah 8:22). The resin traded from Gilead was most likely from Commiphora gileadensis, a relative of myrrh.
• Myrrh and frankincense were incense, perfume and medicine. Myrrh went into the holy anointing oil (Exodus 30:23) and is still one of the best herbs for the mouth, gums and wounds.
• Bitter herbs (maror) are eaten at Passover. Horseradish, chicory and endive, the herbs used today, are all digestive bitters that wake up the liver and stomach.
• Figs were the first poultice recorded in Scripture: Isaiah had a cake of figs laid on King Hezekiah’s boil, and he recovered (2 Kings 20:7).
• Garlic, leeks and onions were the foods Israel missed from Egypt (Numbers 11:5), and they are among the strongest antimicrobial foods known.
• Aloes, cassia, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, dill, mint, mustard, rue and wormwood all appear in the Hebrew Scriptures or the Gospels.

The ancient Hebrew view of healing held two things together: the Creator is the Healer (Rofeh), and the remedies of the earth are His gifts, to be used with wisdom. The book of Ben Sira, written about 200 B.C., says it plainly: the physician and the apothecary are honored, because “the Lord hath created medicines out of the earth” and of them “doth the apothecary make a confection.” That is the spirit of this book.

Egypt: The Ebers Papyrus

The oldest herbal book we have is Egyptian. The Ebers Papyrus, written about 1550 B.C., is a scroll about 20 meters long with some 700 remedies. Many are herbs still in use: aloe for skin, castor oil as a laxative, garlic for strength and infection, juniper, coriander, fennel, myrrh, frankincense, honey for wounds, and willow for pain. The Greek historian Herodotus recorded that the workers who built the Great Pyramid were given radishes, onions and garlic, and Egyptian tombs held cloves of garlic for the afterlife.

Greece and Rome: Dioscorides and the Healing Power of Nature

Hippocrates (about 460–370 B.C.), the “father of medicine,” taught that the body has its own power to heal, which later physicians called vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature. The physician’s job was to support that power with food, rest, water, fresh air and plant remedies, and above all to do no harm.

Dioscorides, a Greek physician who traveled with the Roman army in the first century, wrote De Materia Medica (“On Medical Material”) around A.D. 60–70. It described about 600 plants, where they grow, how to recognize and prepare them, and what they treat. For more than 1,500 years it was the herbal textbook of Europe and the Middle East. It is Dioscorides who first recorded comfrey, symphytum (“to grow together”), as a remedy for broken bones and wounds, the use Dr. Christopher would teach two thousand years later.

Galen (A.D. 129–216), physician to Roman emperors, organized herbs by their “qualities” (hot, cold, wet, dry), and his system ruled European medicine until the 1600s.

China: Shennong and the Energetics of Herbs

Chinese tradition honors Shennong, the “Divine Farmer,” who is said to have tasted hundreds of plants to learn which were food, which were medicine and which were poison. The book named for him, the Shennong Ben Cao Jing (compiled around A.D. 200), lists 365 remedies in three classes: superior herbs that nourish life and can be taken long term (such as ginseng and reishi), middle herbs that strengthen and correct, and inferior herbs that treat disease but are strong and are taken only for a short time. That three-class idea is still one of the wisest ways to think about any herb.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) describes herbs by their energetics: their temperature (hot, warm, neutral, cool, cold), their five tastes (pungent, sweet, sour, bitter, salty) and the organ channels they enter. Ginger and cinnamon warm; peppermint and chrysanthemum cool. A cold, pale, tired person needs warming herbs; a hot, red, inflamed person needs cooling ones. Chinese herbalists rarely give one herb alone. They build formulas with a chief herb, assistants, and a harmonizer such as licorice. You will see the same idea in Dr. Christopher’s formulas in Chapter 5.

India: Ayurveda

Ayurveda, the “knowledge of life,” is India’s traditional medicine, recorded in the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita about 2,000 years ago. It sees each person as a unique balance of three doshas (vata, pitta and kapha) and uses diet, daily rhythm, oil massage, cleansing and herbs to restore balance. Ayurveda gave the world turmeric, ashwagandha, holy basil (tulsi), triphala (a blend of three fruits that gently cleanses the bowel), neem, guggul and gotu kola. Turmeric is still eaten daily in Indian cooking with black pepper and fat, which is exactly how its curcumin is best absorbed.

Eastern Medicine Across Asia Today

In much of Asia, herbal medicine never went away; it grew up alongside modern hospitals.

• In China, many hospitals have both Western and traditional departments, and herbal formulas are prescribed by trained doctors.
• In Japan, the Chinese tradition became Kampo. Doctors trained in modern medicine also prescribe Kampo formulas, and well over a hundred of them are covered by Japan’s national health insurance.
• In India, the government ministry known as AYUSH oversees Ayurveda, yoga, Unani, Siddha and homeopathy, with their own colleges and hospitals.
• Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines each keep their own herbal traditions, from Korean ginseng to Thai herbal compresses to the herb gardens of Singapore, and many people use them side by side with conventional care.

The lesson for us is simple: herbs and modern medicine are not enemies. Where both are respected, people get the best of each: surgery and emergency care when they need them, and gentle, nourishing plant medicine for everything else.

Native American Healers

The first peoples of North America knew their plants intimately, and much of American herbalism came from them. Echinacea was used by Plains peoples for snakebite, wounds and infections. Goldenseal, black cohosh, lobelia, slippery elm, wild cherry, willow bark, sassafras and bloodroot were all native medicines learned by settlers. Sweat lodges, steam and herbal baths were used to break fevers and cleanse the body, the same principle Samuel Thomson would build a movement on.

Europe: Monasteries, Wise Women and Herbals

Through the Middle Ages, monasteries kept Dioscorides alive and grew physic gardens of sage, rue, fennel, lovage and mint. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), a German abbess, wrote about hundreds of plants and their uses. In villages, “wise women” passed herbal knowledge from mother to daughter. In 1652 Nicholas Culpeper published The English Physitian, later called Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, in plain English so ordinary families could treat themselves without expensive physicians. It has never gone out of print.

America: Thomson, the Eclectics and the Great Forgetting

Samuel Thomson (1769–1843), a New Hampshire farmer, built his system on two herbs: lobelia, to relax and cleanse, and cayenne, to heat and stimulate, along with steam baths. His idea was simple: disease is cold and obstruction; life is heat and flow. Restore the heat, clear the obstruction, and the body heals. Thousands of American families bought his “Family Rights” and treated themselves. Dr. Christopher called himself a Thomsonian herbalist, and Dr. Schulze still teaches cayenne and lobelia as the two herbs every home should have.

After Thomson came the Physiomedicalists and the Eclectics, trained physicians who used native herbs. The Eclectics’ great reference, King’s American Dispensatory (1898), is still read by herbalists today. By 1900 there were dozens of herbal and homeopathic medical schools in the United States.

Then came the great forgetting. The Flexner Report of 1910, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, judged medical schools by the standard of laboratory and drug-based medicine. Within a few decades the herbal, Eclectic and homeopathic schools had closed. Herbs were dropped from the official pharmacopeia one by one, and plant medicine was pushed to the edges.

Yet many of the drugs that replaced herbs came from herbs:

The Revival

In the twentieth century a few stubborn herbalists kept the knowledge alive. Dr. John R. Christopher founded the School of Natural Healing in 1953 and taught thousands of students (Chapter 4). His student Dr. Richard Schulze brought Christopher’s formulas to a new generation (Chapter 3). Rosemary Gladstar founded Sage Mountain and United Plant Savers, which protects wild medicinal plants. Today herbalism is growing again around the world.

Dr. Josh Axe, a doctor of natural medicine, makes the same case in his book Ancient Remedies (2021): the healing systems of China, India, Greece and the Hebrew Scriptures were built on careful observation over thousands of years, and their remedies (herbs, mushrooms, essential oils, broths and fasting) answer modern problems that modern drugs often only cover over. What these traditions share is more important than how they differ:

• The body heals itself; the healer supports it.
• Treat the whole person, not the symptom.
• Food is the first medicine.
• Use the gentlest remedy that works.
• Prevention is better than cure.

What Herbs Do

Whole Plants, Not Isolated Chemicals

A drug is usually one molecule. An herb is hundreds. That difference matters. Willow bark and meadowsweet contain salicylates like aspirin, but meadowsweet also contains tannins and mucilage, and herbalists use it to soothe an upset stomach, while aspirin can make the stomach bleed. Herbalists call this synergy: the parts of the plant work together and balance one another. It is why herbs tend to work more gently and with fewer side effects than drugs, and why they often help in places you did not expect.

Food Herbs and Medicine Herbs

Some herbs are so gentle and nourishing that they are really foods: nettle, oat straw, red raspberry leaf, alfalfa, dandelion, rose hips, parsley, ginger and garlic. These can be taken daily for months. Others are strong medicines, taken in measured amounts for a limited time: lobelia, senna, cascara sagrada, goldenseal, wormwood, mandrake. Most herbs fall in between. Like the three classes of the Shennong Ben Cao Jing, the stronger the herb, the shorter the course.

The Herbalist’s Vocabulary

Herbalists describe herbs by their actions, what they do in the body. Dr. Christopher organized his whole Herbal Syllabus this way, and so is Part Two of this book.

Energetics: Hot and Cold, Damp and Dry

The old herbalists of every culture noticed that herbs have temperaments. Cayenne, ginger and cinnamon are hot; peppermint, chickweed and aloe are cool. Astringents like white oak are drying; demulcents like slippery elm are moistening. People have temperaments too. A person who is cold, pale and sluggish needs warming herbs. A person who is hot, flushed and irritable needs cooling ones. A dry, hacking cough needs a moistening demulcent; a wet, rattling cough needs a drying expectorant. When an herb seems not to work, the herbalist asks: did I match the herb to the person?

Using Herbs Safely

Herbs are safe in the hands of someone who respects them. Most of the harm blamed on herbs comes from a few causes: the wrong plant, the wrong amount, an interaction with a drug, or using a home remedy when the person needed emergency care. Learn these, and you will avoid nearly every problem.

Drug Interactions

These are the interactions every herbalist should know by heart. The herb entries in Part Two list each herb’s own cautions.

Some medications must never be stopped suddenly: those for blood pressure, seizures, heart rhythm, mental health and steroids such as prednisone. When herbs and a healthier life lower the need for a drug, the drug comes down gradually, with the prescriber.

Pregnancy and Breastfeeding

Pregnancy calls for the gentlest herbs. These are the herbs Dr. Christopher and generations of midwives relied on: red raspberry leaf (a tonic for the uterus, traditionally taken through the pregnancy), nettle, oat straw, alfalfa, squaw vine (in the last weeks), ginger in normal amounts for morning sickness, chamomile for sleep and peppermint for heartburn.

Leave these out during pregnancy, because they stimulate the uterus, are too strong, or both: pennyroyal, tansy, rue, mugwort, wormwood, southernwood, life root, blue cohosh (until the midwife uses it at term), goldenseal, barberry, Oregon grape, mandrake, poke root, the stimulant laxatives (senna, cascara, aloe, rhubarb), large amounts of sage and parsley (food amounts are fine), and essential oils taken by mouth.

While breastfeeding, remember that sage and peppermint dry up milk, which is useful at weaning and unwelcome before. Fenugreek, blessed thistle, fennel and nettle increase milk. What the mother takes, the baby receives in a small amount, which is how many herbalists treat a nursing baby: through the mother.

Dosing Children and Elders

Children are not small adults, but their herb doses can be worked out from an adult’s. The two old rules:

• Clark’s rule (by weight): child’s weight in pounds ÷ 150 × adult dose. A 50-pound child gets 50/150 = one third of the adult dose.
• Young’s rule (by age, for children over 2): age ÷ (age + 12) × adult dose. A 6-year-old gets 6/18 = one third of the adult dose.

Use the gentle herbs for children: chamomile, catnip, lemon balm, peppermint (not on the face of a baby), elder, fennel, slippery elm, calendula and plantain. Give glycerites, syrups or teas rather than alcohol tinctures, or put an alcohol tincture into a little hot water for a few minutes so most of the alcohol evaporates. Never give honey, including honey syrups, to a baby under one year old (risk of infant botulism). For infants, herbal baths and the mother’s own tea are often the best route.

Elders often take several medications, clear things more slowly through the liver and kidneys, and may be frail. Start with half the adult amount, check every medication against the interaction table, and build slowly.

Amounts and How Long

General adult amounts for most medium-strength herbs (each entry in Part Two gives its own):

• Tea (infusion): 1–2 teaspoons of dried herb (or a small handful of fresh) per cup of water, 3 cups a day.
• Decoction: about 1 ounce of root or bark to 1½ pints of water, simmered down, taken in ½-cup doses (Chapter 2).
• Tincture: 1–2 dropperfuls (30–60 drops) in a little water, 2–3 times a day. For acute illness, smaller doses more often.
• Capsules: 2–3 size “00” capsules (about 500 mg each), 2–3 times a day.

For long-term use, Dr. Christopher taught taking herbs six days a week and resting the seventh, and many herbalists take a week off after several weeks of a strong herb. The rest lets the body show you what the herb has done.

Quality and Sourcing

An herb is only as good as its quality. Good dried herbs still look, smell and taste like the plant: peppermint is green and smells strongly of mint; chamomile flowers are yellow and sweet-smelling. Brown, dusty, scentless herbs have lost their power.

• Buy organic or ethically wild-harvested herbs from suppliers you trust. I buy from Mountain Rose Herbs, Pacific Botanicals and Azure Standard, and use Amazon only as a last resort.
• Store herbs in glass jars, away from light, heat and moisture. Leaves and flowers keep their strength for about a year, roots and barks for two to three years. Powders lose strength fastest, so powder as you need. Alcohol tinctures keep for many years.
• Buy cultivated, not wild, for plants that are being overharvested: goldenseal, American ginseng, lady’s slipper, black and blue cohosh, false unicorn and true unicorn root (Chapter 6).
• Label everything with the name (common and Latin), the part, the date and the source.

When It Is an Emergency

Herbs belong in every home first aid kit (Chapter 3), and Dr. Schulze and Dr. Christopher both used them in emergencies, on the way to help. These signs mean calling emergency services first:

• Chest pain or pressure, or pain spreading to the arm, jaw or back
• Signs of a stroke: a drooping face, a weak arm, slurred speech
• Severe bleeding that pressure does not stop
• Trouble breathing, or swelling of the lips, tongue or throat
• A stiff neck with fever, confusion or a spreading purple rash
• Any fever in a baby under three months, or a high fever that will not come down
• Poisoning, including a child who has swallowed an herb, oil or medicine (in the United States, Poison Control is 1-800-222-1222)
• Serious burns, broken bones, head injuries with confusion or vomiting
• Sudden severe abdominal pain

The wise herbalist knows both what herbs can do and when to call for help.

Sources and further reading

• Axe, J. Ancient Remedies: Secrets to Healing with Herbs, Essential Oils, CBD, and the Most Powerful Natural Medicine in History. Little, Brown Spark, 2021.
• Dioscorides. De Materia Medica (first century A.D.); English edition by T. A. Osbaldeston, Ibidis Press, 2000.
• Ebers Papyrus (about 1550 B.C.), Leipzig University Library.
• Culpeper, N. The English Physitian (1652), later Culpeper’s Complete Herbal.
• Thomson, S. New Guide to Health; or Botanic Family Physician. 1822.
• Felter, H. W., and Lloyd, J. U. King’s American Dispensatory. 1898.
• Flexner, A. Medical Education in the United States and Canada. Carnegie Foundation, 1910.
• Christopher, J. R. School of Natural Healing. Christopher Publications, 1976.
• Gladstar, R. Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide. Storey, 2012.
• World Health Organization. WHO Global Report on Traditional and Complementary Medicine. 2019.
• Genesis 1:29; Exodus 12:22, 30:23; Numbers 11:5; 2 Kings 20:7; Psalm 51:7; Jeremiah 8:22; Ezekiel 47:12; Ben Sira 38:1–8.