The Temper of Herbs

Abstract

This book concerns an on-going laboratory research project investigating the elemental and humoral constitution of medicinal herbs as given by classical sources. So, for example, when the Roman physician Claudius Galen or the renaissance herbalist Nicholas Culpeper say that Hemlock is an herb which is Cold in the 4th degree and Dry in the 3rd degree, we may have a method of confirming such a classification or of producing a classification if one does not exist. The determination of a medicinal herb’s ability to affect the body and the relative intensity of that effect is a problem with a long pedigree of great minds in medicine, chemistry, and mathematics from ancient times to the present.

The methodology of the present study employs modern thermogravimetric analysis combined with the classical “analysis by fire” or “spagyric anatomy” as described by alchemists from at least the time of Jabir ibn Hayyan (circa 800 CE) and which became the center of a great debate on the number and nature of the elements in the seventeenth century.