Earthwise Herbal Materia Medica
by Matthew Wood
The Earthwise Herbal is the product of more than twenty-five years of active practice by the author. It is founded upon personal experience in tens of thousands of cases—a lifetime portfolio that few of the biomedical chemists and researchers introducing plant products into the marketplace can claim.
I have called this herbal “earthwise” to contrast it to other herbals reflecting the pharmacological approach
It is based on sources that the scientific approach ignores: historical uses, folk medicine, folk practitioners, the experience of actual herbalists, intuitive concepts of energy, plant properties, and medicine, daydreams, and dreams. It is, however, “scientific” in a broader sense of the word because it follows an organized and reasonably critical approach to understanding plant medicine. The Earthwise Herbal is organized around the concept that each plant has an innate intelligence or core “essence,” as the ancients would have said, binding together the disparate properties and uses into a meaningful and logical or intuitive whole. The compounds in the plant, its appearance, growth habit, ecological niche, and medicinal properties are united by this common personality, intelligence, or essence. This knowledge not only represents the “inwardness” of the thing—as the Quakers would say—but it represents the whole that unites the parts. This approach is thus set upon a holistic foundation.
All of the MM of the original Vol 1 and 2 is included with the exception of a handful of ‘small’ remedies that did not make it into the Repertory. The introductory material has been re-ordered (and silently re-edited in a few places) to reflect the integration of the 2 volumes (only separated because NAB did not see the wisdom of releasing the volumes as 1 hardback first, alas and was focused on 2 paperbacks. But you will find in these introductory chapters nearly all the core theory of western herbalism from Hippocrates to the 19th/20th century eclectics.
