The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [163]
The herbal guides and sources that I have on my shelf currently are all listed in the “Bibliography” section of this book, in a section to themselves, for the convenience of readers with a particular interest in botanical medicine. (I acquired these books over a period of several years, so I didn’t necessarily have all of them available to me during the writing of my novels.)
One of the first herbals I acquired was The New Age Herbal, which was very helpful indeed, as it included not only general descriptions of various popular herbs and their current uses, but also photographs of the plants, roots, seeds, flowers, etc.
Fairly soon thereafter, I found a copy (a reprint, I hasten to add) of Nicholas Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, originally published in 1647. This book is also profusely illustrated (with small color drawings), but its chief value to a historical novelist is that it notes the uses to which herbs were put during historical times.
Besides providing picturesque details of ailments and treatments, it gives one some notion of the prevailing theories of medicine, and the light in which people saw illness and bodily function. Culpeper’s is one of a particular class of book that is particularly useful for historical fiction background, regardless of whether the herbs in question are actually effective. Books of folklore, folk medicine (American Folk Medicine), and ethnic medicine (Indian Herbology of North America) fall into this category; they may be only picturesque for someone interested in practical applications, but they’re invaluable to a writer with an interest in bygone ways.
One other small consideration that affects writers of historical fiction is that plants found in a particular geographical location today might not always have grown there. Of course, one can always manage to acquire anything that’s really necessary for the plot, via a handy merchant, an Oriental traveler, or a peripatetic naturalist—but it’s a good idea to determine whether that’s really necessary.
The eighteenth century was a time of considerable global exploration and growth in international commerce; consequently, a good many European plants were imported to the Americas—and vice versa—during this time. Still, most such exotic imports would have been limited to apothecary shops in large cities, or to the ornamental gardens kept by many wealthy (and not-so-wealthy) people with an interest in botany. In other words, a character could not reasonably walk into the wild-woods of North Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century and pick horse chestnuts, though they might reasonably do so in a coastal town, where this particular English tree had been planted by a homesick emigrant.
COMFREY
Formerly country people cultivated Comfrey in their gardens for its virtue in wound healing, and the many local names of the plant testify to its long reputation as a vulnerary herb—in the Middle Ages it was a famous remedy for broken bones.
Grieve (A Modern Herbal)
One drawback to herbal guides is that while some do note that such-and-such a plant is an import from say, Asia or Europe, many don’t—and they rarely tell you when a plant was imported. There are three things that can help with the problem of geographical plausibility: a) read widely—after a time, you become familiar with where and when the more common plants came into use; b) compare guides with a geographical basis (The Hamlyn Guide to Edible and Medicinal Plants of Britain and Northern Europe vs. A Handbook of Native American