The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook_ A Home Manual - James Green [44]
2. Prepare the most suitable and efficient menstruum you can based on your previous experience and your knowledge of the plant properties. This information will be discussed in the following chapter. Remember to make detailed notes about the menstruums you formulate (the 4th rule of good medicine-making).
3. Make your tincture or other form of extract. (Refer to Chapters Eight through Seventeen.)
4. Now, use your common senses. Smell your finished extract, draw some of it into a glass dropper (pipette) and observe closely its color, put a drop or two of it on your tongue and taste it … Mmm! Or maybe, Yuck! (“Yuck!” is not necessarily bad, but merely intense or surprisingly unusual.) If your settled extract does not remain cloudy (at first most extracts appear cloudy before suspended sediment settles out), and it smells and tastes like the plant it was derived from, you’ve formulated a good menstruum for the herb at hand.
5. Dispense your herbal preparation. If it performs as you want it to, you’ve made a good extract; you have your herbal tonic/medicine. If you’re not totally pleased, next time (and maybe the time after that) modify your menstruum until you are pleased; we’ve all done this many times; experience is the story of one’s venture into the unknown.
MENSTRUUM MENU—7 LIQUIDS TO USE AS SOLVENTS
There are seven liquids readily available to us which we will discuss for use as menstrua in this manual. They are water, wine, vinegar, ethyl alcohol, alcohol-water mixture, oil, and glycerin, your basic community “potluck” components.
These seven menstrua are common kitchen supplies (except maybe the glycerin) that are abundant, easy to acquire, safe to use, and for our purposes, excellent solvents for making liquid extracts and herbal medicine in a home lab. In fact, most of these seven liquids are the principal solvents the pharmaceutical and herb industry professionals use as their primary menstrua (so much for that proprietary “scientific” mystery). There are many other menstrua used by these industries also, such as acetone, chloroform, methyl alcohol, denatured alcohol, amylic alcohol, acetic ether, sulfuric ether, hexane, and carbon disulfide. In my belief system, bodily contact with these particular solvents is neither safe nor pleasant. They are quite irritating to the healthy flow of a human being’s life force, and in my opinion the complexity of their by-products renders them a forbidding conundrum for use in creating kindly internal and external herbal preparations. Sufficient to say for this manual, further discussion of these toxic substances draws to a close here. The original liquid seven, however, will receive a predominance of our focus, for they in the hands of the herbalist are the prime shakers and movers of the act of herbal extraction. As an introduction, I will make a cursory overview of them, then give more specifics in the following pages.
WATER
Water is a universal element. One of the most important products of nature, its presence or absence plays a major role in the economy of our planet. Water is more or less involved in almost all the changes that take place in inorganic matter, and it is quintessential to the growth and existence of all living beings, whether animal or vegetable. Chemically, water is extraordinarily talented, ingenious in its field, very stable, and predictable, and therefore a most versatile and reliable tool. Water, being immensely abundant, is an inexpensive ingredient. The only controversy limiting the free use of water in the current adolescent stage of our civilization is that we have to clean most of our water before we can consume it. Water’s indefatigable solvent action has dissolved and is holding in solution much of our culture’s discarded debris, slowly decomposing this litter (for water is fortunately not a preservative—except