The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook_ A Home Manual - James Green [130]
If you’re close, the attempted metric/avoirdupois conversions in this chapter might push you over the edge. Sorry.
ELECTUARIES
Rose Electuary
To make a Rose electuary from the petals of garden and/or wild Roses, which is useful as a mildly astringent, pleasant-tasting vehicle for deliver of other powders:
20 Gm Rose petals in very fine #60 powder (2/3 oz.) (see “Powdering,” Chapter Twenty-Five)
160 Gm finely powdered sugar (5 oz.+)
30 Gm honey (I oz.)
40 ml Rosewater (I 1/3 fl-oz.)
1. Heat the Rosewater to approximately 150° F. (65° Q); remove from the heat.
2. Pour in the Rose powder and rub it to reduce the Roses to a pulpy mash.
3. Gradually add the honey and sugar.
Orange Electuary
To make an Orange electuary for use to administer very bitter powders:
1. Grate 120 Gm (4 oz.) of fresh outer peel of Orange.
2. Slowly add 360 Gm (12 oz.) of sugar, mixing it in thoroughly.
Laxative Electuary
Standard dose is 15 to 30 Gm (1/2 to 1 oz.).
Sometimes honey and sugar are not necessary, as in the following laxative electuary:
40 Gm Prune deprived of seed
40 Gm Dates deprived of seed
40 Gm dried Fig
40 Gm seedless Raisins
10 Gm Senna in fine powder or Cascara sagrada in fine powder
1. Pass all the ingredients through a small hand-cranked meat grinder (attainable at most antique/collectible stores) to produce a uniform paste.
2. Store in a tightly covered jar in refrigerator.
I considered giving this chapter a controversial title, possibly incorporating terms like passionate immersions, or wet bodies, or secrets of water erotica revealed, for, as it is titled, on first encounter many readers might pass over it (packaging is the gist of most products these days). For the most part in our culture, we have lost appreciation for and interest in the profound therapeutic effects of simple hot, warm, and cold water applications. We have forfeited most of our conscious knowledge of how to tap into the healing energetics of water by merely varying its temperature, getting in it for a short while and back out. This is unfortunate for, with its characteristic ability to affect human circulation by transferring heat to and from the body and from here to there in the body, water therapy lies at the very heart of health maintenance and natural medicine.
Water’s solvency and fluidity have been major players in most of the medicinal preparations we have discussed so far, and in many of them water is one of their primary ingredients. I am compiling this chapter on baths and other forms of water application, because intuitively it feels important also to explore the nature of water as an externally applied tonic and medicine. My instincts make it clear to me that simple water therapy, or hydrotherapy, is an important component of any book that promotes homecrafted medicines and independent domestic health care. I’ve learned a great deal by undertaking this task, as I too had limited exposure to and experience in using water/bath therapy. I have relied on the publications in the early 1900s of professional practitioners of hydrotherapy, such as physicians J. H. Kellogg, A. Stillé, and G. B. Wood, along with the teachings of my now deceased friend, Wade Boyle, N.D., along with other specific information that I found here and there to guide me in my own understanding and experimentation. So I offer you the following basic principles of water therapy, and, after having applied much of it myself, I wholeheartedly encourage you to work with this information to further educate yourself about the phenomenal uses and pleasures of full body and partial immersion water/bath therapy. At the very least immerse yourself in the information about the strategy of the “whole body, cold water plunge,” and then do it. I’m confident you will enjoy your experiences as you experiment with these techniques on your own wet body.
You’ll need a good bath thermometer.