Preface

Ancient Herbs and Modern Herbs: A Comprehensive Reference Guide
to Medicinal Herbs, Human Ailments and Possible Herbal Remedies
by James Kedzie Sayre.

Preface

Why would anyone write another book on herbs, when there are already many finely written and illustrated books on the subject? There are now literally hundreds of books on herbs that have been published in English in the United States, Canada, England and elsewhere within the last one hundred years. Some books feature excellent color photographs or beautiful water color paintings of herbs. Some books delve deeply into the history and folklore of herbs. Some give specific directions on the preparation and consumption of herbal remedies. Other books detail the cultivation and harvesting of herbs. Many books ignore or gloss over the poisonous or toxic aspects of taking herbs for medicinal purposes.

One of the purposes of this book is to fill in the gaps of knowledge and information found in many of the current books written about herbs. This book has listed over twelve hundred plants, with their scientific names, their family name, a brief thumbnail description of the plant and a discussion of possible culinary and medicinal uses. It also contains possible toxic and harmful qualities of each of these plants. In the accompanying CD-ROM, there is a comprehensive listing of folknames along with a detailed etymology of the common name.

Another purpose of this book is to support the idea of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration's standard for purity, proper labeling and the evaluation of possible usefulness of medicinal herbs. The section of this book called "Possible Herbal Remedies" lists hundreds of relatively non-toxic medicinal herbal remedies for a wide variety of human ailments. Some of these herbs have been scientifically evaluated in such countries as Germany, China and India. These foreign tests of herbs need to be translated into English and evaluated.

The FDA needs to create a program to test for medicinal herbs for purity. They then need to set up programs to test these medicinal herbs for their usefulness for a wide variety of ailments. Scientific double-blind tests, the sort now employed for the qualification of pharmaceutical drugs to be FDA approved for general use, need to be used on medicinal herbs. This testing will undoubtedly lead to many useful herbal remedies that by and large do not carry a long list of unpleasant and possibly dangerous side effects the way many prescription drugs do.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Please feel free to Email the author at sayresayre@yahoo;com. sayresayre@yahoo.com

Web pages originally designed by Bottlebrush Press and recently revised by James Sayre.

Contact author James K. Sayre at sayresayre@yahoo.com. sayresayre@yahoo.com

Web page last updated on 23 June 2003.