Whether or not it’s some kind of syndrome I’ve never bothered to find out, but I’m a bit obsessive about lists, catalogues and picture dictionaries. The first book I ever truly loved – I can’t have been more than five or six years old – was a picture dictionary and recently I was shown an almost identical book in Welsh which I found very moving. So my memory is cluttered with a lot of fragmentary information on random subjects from embroidery silks, ships, artists’ materials and above all plants. I collect floras and Herbals these days but I rarely throw a seed catalogue away because I love the names of plants and their varieties. Cider apple trees are a particular favourite. Where else could you find a variety called “Slack ma Girdle“, which shares a group name with a number of cousins known as Woodbine, often but not always associated with Honeysuckle. As you see, the brain rot is advanced. Words are my crack cocaine.
All of which is a long-winded explanation to account for my memory of a Herbalist’s catalogue which I saw in the early 1970’s and which advertised a remedy called “Golden Seal” accompanied by testimonials which, unforgettably, gave a grisly account by a satisfied customer who had “coughed up a tumour” only a week after starting a course of treatment. And so it lingers in my mind among the uncatalogued memories in the folder marked “hell’s teeth!” However the problem with these unpursued thoughts and memories is that they bide their time and – like the devil – wait for an opportune moment. Opportunity knocked for Goldenseal last week after many years of gestation as I was cataloguing some photographs which I took in mid-Wales a couple of years ago of a Goldenrod plant which was abundant around the old gold mine at Dolaucothi. It’s at the top of this piece. Somehow my brain had managed to scramble Goldenrod and Goldenseal and so the plant with its deeply dubious reputation had got itself (virtually) filed in the wrong place – which didn’t matter until I thought about it. But you know what thinking does.
And so I moved from a casual word association to a determined search through the books and the internet to disambiguate the two plants which involved two fascinating diversions into law and history. Both plants were extensively used by First Nation and Native American cultures and both are still in use today around the world albeit for different purposes. They don’t belong to the same family; Goldenrod is as a member of the Asteraceae, Daisy family; and Golden Seal is in the Buttercups, the Ranunculaceae. Goldenrod is used to make a tea and is used as a diuretic and astringent. It was once called Liberty Tea by American settlers in the independence movement and was used among many other things for staunching bleeding or burns. Gerard of Gerard’s Herbal fame writes that it was taken as a medicine for stab wounds and cuts (one of its Somerset names was Woundwort which is a quite different plant) and Geoffrey Grigson – my favourite chronicler of English plants – reports that during early medieval times it was gathered and sold at fabulous prices (half a Crown an ounce) due to the amount of “stabbing and thrusting” going on. It fell out of favour and later on Gerard says you could by a hundredweight of Goldenrod at the same price. Given that it’s a 5 minute bus ride to the Royal United Hospital A&E I think I would give it a miss. Mrs Grieve gives it her approval in the 1930’s and relates a fanciful and alarming report of a boy who, following treatment passed 15 large bladder stones up to one and a half ounces in 1788. I don’t know what to think about the suffering involved were it true. It’s still sold and used for a range of purposes and even appears in the 1983 British Herbal Pharmacopoeia. It appears to meet most of the purposes it’s recommended for without dangerous side effects.
That, however takes me back to the starting point for this piece because Golden Seal (Hydrastis canadensis) has a wholly different history. My first encounter in a herbalist’s catalogue led to my misidentification and the horror stories about coughing up tumours. A very easy Gemini search established that KIngswood, now a suburb of East Bristol but back then still in Gloucestershire near where I was born, was a hotspot for Herbalists warehouses. None of them now exist in their original form, but it may be important to mention that Kingswood was also on the South Gloucestershire Coalfield and had its own mines and miners. It was said that the miners of Cock Road were instrumental in the sacking of Bristol Prison and burning down the Mansion House during the Bristol Riots while supporting the Reform movement. Miners got pneumoconiosis (the Dust) and consequently herbal remedies for chronic lung disease including Tuberculosis which my paternal granny died from would have found an eager audience for the snake oil salesmen who were ever too happy to make a quick buck out of suffering. I’m not in any way against herbal (phyto) medicine, in fact I’ve found it interesting enough to mix up some basic simple remedies for myself but as any internet enquiry will warn you – it’s not always safe to believe everything you read online.
So back to Golden Seal; it too gets a positive mention in all of my herbals up to and including the 1983 British Herbal Pharmacopoeia, which means it’s been verified, tested and safe for use which, lets be fair, may still not mean its as effective as the treatment the doctor offers. What could never have been acceptable were the outrageous claims for anti-cancer properties made, up until the late twenty sixties, which have since then been regulated and banned in the UK. Golden Seal is normally prescribed for problems with the mucous membranes such as lungs, stomach and bowel disorders and like several other members of the same plant family was once used to progress childbirth – which means it should never be used during pregnancy. Many herbal remedies have been isolated and synthesised and now find a home in regular medicine but there are still people who think that phytomedicine is somehow closer to nature and less dangerous. In some cases that may be true but equally it may be a dangerous risk – which leads me to one final point.
Herbalists and their suppliers are now regulated to control untested use of potentially dangerous medicines -where the therapeutic dose may be milligrams away from the fatal one. But one area which lacks any kind of legal (or self) control is the internet and its battalions of influencers, who are often paid to promote dangerous procedures and products just as did the herbalists of Kingswood. I find it unbelievable that influencers can now promote lethal nonsense that would be illegal in print.
The wild world is a wonderful gift to us, and if and when(ever) cancer cures are found, the chances are they will have begun as an interesting plant compound or even an account in an ancient manuscript that provokes – as it did with me – a little bit of research. I’ve written before about the dangers of foraging and eating plants without adequate background understanding, and the same applies to herbal medicine. In untrained hands it’s as dangerous as connecting your household mains to the lamp-post outside. Come to think of it, that’s illegal too!
