Old herbals and their cures

Waterbirds are on my mind after a week in the Netherlands and my journey home, wondering at enormous gatherings of Canada geese in low-lying fields from Rotterdam.  

Culpeper

They have me thinking about old herbals. It's nearly a lifetime since I bought my first which was Culpeper and I love every one I come across. I joke I'm a witch, or it's in my genes or that I loved chemistry at school. 

I am constantly captivated by the concept of cures in the bark, leaves, roots, insects, animals and flowers around me. 

Ming Herbal, Wellcome Collection

Some of the cures may seem unbelievable, but  centuries on, I'll guarantee research is going on somewhere into an obscure recipe once created by a woman or man who set a broken bone, relieved a persistent cough or a rash. They too experimented. 
These precious sources are increasingly digitised. One of the sources I go to is the Wellcome Collection. And so I search herbal cures, find Dr Henry Oakley writing about the castor oil plant and how the outer coat of the seed is the source of ricin, one of the most deadly poisons. 

Ming Herbal

And while I marvel at the language and combinations of these cures, because there's something alchemical about them, I'm pulled in a different direction by the illustrations. Drawings and paintings found in old herbals play on me, make me feel the connection that artist had with a plant or a bird, a connection that comes from looking. 

As I browse, I'm there, for a moment, in a pre-industrial landscape of plants, insects, birds, non-human species. When humans grubbed up fields in battle, bluebottles and beetles moved in. Our houses collapsed and went back to the earth. Some of our paths remained but they weren’t murderous. 
In 1644, two Chinese artists Zhou Hu and Zhou Xi painted birds around them in a collection known as Bencao tupu (illustrated herbal). The herbal was never completed but I have kept some of its birds in my laptop as if their very presence is a charm. Zhou Rongqi wrote the text, explaining the flesh of the xichi duck, for example, was used to treat Qi deficiency. The pigeon was known as a flying servant. 
I wonder if the knowledge of herbs, like the knowledge of growing food, sewing and mending, is a kind of insurance policy for the days so many of us dread. 

Tibetan herbal, Wellcome Collection