Country Remedies: The Survival of East Anglia’s Traditional Plant Medicines (1994; Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2009). ISBN 978-1-84383-505-9 (PB). 168pp.

Abstract

174 BOOK REVIEWS and Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen, and a fascinating comparison of the textbook interpretation of psychological trauma since 1945 in three very different places: Germany, Great Britain, and Serbia. Both collections have much to offer to a wide range of readers working in this field, and are well worth examining. Each chapter stands alone and can be easily read and digested, none is over-long, and their brevity is useful for readers who are new to many of these previously unexplored fields. Both collections’ scope and theoretical challenges mean that they would also be useful as teaching material, as well as background resources for researchers. PHILIPPA MARTYR UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA Gabrielle Hatfield, Country Remedies: The Survival of East Anglia’s Traditional Plant Medicines (1994; Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2009). ISBN 978-1-84383-505-9 (PB). 168pp. In the 1920s, Dr Mark Taylor made a survey of herbal remedies then in use in East Anglia. His major source of information was local branches of the Women’s Institute (WI), but he also consulted other doctors and a range of individual informants. The WI is an organisation with many similarities to the Australian Country Women’s Association and in the 1920s it seems to have been very much representative of the interests of country women, born and bred. Seventy years later, Gabrielle Hatfield, who describes herself as a botanist and folklorist, embarked on a similar project in the same eastern counties of England. However, by the 1990s, many WI branches were dominated by relative newcomers to village life and Hatfield found phone-ins to local radio shows and conversations in village shops to be more fruitful sources of information. In this easy-to-read little book (148 pages including footnotes, appendices detailing all the remedies collected by both Hatfield and Taylor, bibliography, and index), Hatfield compares her own findings with those of Taylor in the 1920s. Taylor’s informants were largely reporting remedies that they had used themselves relatively recently, whilst in the 1990s, informants were more likely to be reporting childhood reminiscences or hearsay. Health & History ● 13/2 ● 2011 175 Hatfield concludes that in the earlier period, herbal remedies were especially important to the less well-off members of village communities and that the introduction of the National Health Service reduced their dependence on self-help of this kind. She also argues that local herbal lore, using readily available hedgerow and garden plants, is likely to die out within a generation or so. Hatfield argues that traditional remedies handed down by word of mouth are already well on the way to being replaced by herbal remedies from books of the kind that require store-bought ingredients, including North American plants. However, even among the older remedies, it is very difficult to disentangle those that have survived by oral transmission alone. The inclusion of remedies in Gerard’s Herbal, for instance, or the works of Culpepper, may well have contributed to their longevity. There is also ample evidence of innovation within the herbal tradition. For instance, the use of greater celandine for eye complaints and lily bulbs for poultices were recorded as early as the tenth century (in the Anglo-Saxon Leech Book of Bald), but the multiple remedies that make use of potatoes can hardly pre-date the seventeenth century. As a botanist, Hatfield takes a ‘pro-herbal’ approach and argues both that many of the remedies were effective and that scientific investigation of their efficacy is a worthwhile project. Indeed, she outlines her role in the hospital trial of an un-named plant as a remedy for leg ulcers. Unfortunately, she does not confront the thorny issue of commercial costs and benefits. If a therapeutically effective plant is freely available in the hedgerow, who is going to think it worthwhile to pay for clinical trials? Overall, however, this is a charming and useful record of many twentieth-century English country remedies. As a product of an English country childhood myself, reading it brought back all manner of memories (and remedies). Perhaps I too should note down my mother’s and my grandmother’s views on plant lore. I have certainly never passed any such information on to my...