IRCH - HerbText

Herbal Medicine is the oldest form of medicine and has at one time been the dominant healing therapy throughout all cultures and peoples world-wide. The first examples of the use of herbs as medicines date back to the very dawn of mankind. Archaeologists have found evidence of the use of herbs by Neanderthal man in Iraq some sixty thousand years ago. All of the ancient civilisations - the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Indian and Roman used herbs as an integral part of their various medical systems. The first famous Herbalist, who stressed the importance of nature in healing, was Hippocrates, known as the 'Father of Medicine'. Two other well known figures in medical herbalism known to us in the UK are Culpeper and Gerard, who both produced 'Herbals' in the 17th century. Herbal medicine, due to its rich folk knowledge and the unpleasantness of orthodox remedies, continued to grow and thrive as the main traditional medicine over the next two centuries. By the Middle Ages, herbalists were being persecuted by the then orthodox profession and it was during the reign of Henry VIII that the Parliament passed the Herbalists Act of 1542, allowing herbalists to practise without interference from the medical establishment. The name Herbalists Act was officially given to the old statute as recently as 1948 when Parliament passed a law known as The Statutes Law Revision Act. It was not until the end of the 19th century that orthodox medicine became the dominant form of treatment in the West. In fact, it is only in the last seventy-five years that the majority of medicines used by orthodox doctors are now synthetic chemicals, although initially these too were extracted and prepared from herbs. Until very recently, herbalists were the only traditional medicine practitioners to have recognition in British Law, with statutes dating back to the sixteenth century. In 1968, herbalists, unique among the unorthodox practitioners, were given legal protection under the Medicines Act of that year, legislation which, in a revised form, is still in operation today. In more recent times, November 1994, herbal medicines came under serious threat through oppressive legislation, but thanks to a massive national campaign both our rights and heritage were saved again. In the middle of the 19th century, the National Association of Medical Herbalists was formed, an association which later gave birth to today's most prominent registers of medical herbalists of which the International Register of Consultant Herbalists and Homoeopaths (formerly the General Council and Register of Consultant Herbalists) is one of the foremost in the UK with both Members and Students throughout the world. It is on the long and continuous history of herbs as medicine, together with knowledge taken from modern scientific research, that today's herbalism is based.