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I was extremely fortunate, myself, in having as a friend Robert Lee Riffle, an experienced botanist with a good reference library. An excellent literary critic as well as a botanist (and an accomplished author himself—The Tropical Look: An Encyclopedia of Dramatic Landscape Plants, Bob was invaluable in helping me find out when and where things grow, and what they look like while doing so. It’s a great comfort to a novelist to have a reliable source to whom one can say, “I need a big green bush that grows in the Caribbean and was there during the eighteenth century. It needs to be big enough to hide behind, and it would be nice if you know what it smells like in the rain.”

Naturally, not everyone is lucky enough to have a personal botanist on call. However, there are electronic sources of such information: the Garden Forum on CompuServe (also the California and Florida Forums), and similar special-interest areas on America Online. Staffed and patronized by very knowledgeable and helpful people, online reference is one of the best and easiest ways to locate information on specific plants or on the botany of a particular region.

Microbotanicals: Penicillin and other Antibiotics

I should mention a particular application of botanical medicine—penicillin. The advent of antibiotics was the third great revolution in modern medicine— anesthesia being the first, a general acceptance of the Germ Theory (with the consequent practice of asepsis) being the second. The discovery of penicillin (and other antibiotics) was in fact an outgrowth of research into disease-causing organisms—bacterial pathogens.

I don’t imagine there are many people who don’t know the basic story: Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident, as the result of poor housekeeping (let’s hear it for creative mess!). That is, he noticed that a bacterial culture he was growing had been contaminated— and that the contaminant, whatever it was, had secreted a substance that had killed the bacterial culture around it.

What many people don’t realize is that Sir Alexander did not immediately pick up a hypodermic and start saving lives right and left. While the original discovery was made in 1929, penicillin didn’t become available for general medical use until 1947. This was not because the original discovery was slighted or ignored; it was because it took medical researchers that long to find methods of purifying and stabilizing the product. Prior to that time, penicillin was simply not very useful in a medical sense because it was impossible to tell the strength of a particular batch, to know what dosage might be effective, or to rely on the medicine maintaining its effectiveness for any set period of time.

I occasionally get letters inquiring why Claire is not slapping moldy bread on wounds throughout the books, since surely she knows about penicillin? Well, actually, she does—which is why she isn’t slapping moldy bread on people.

What she knows is that a) while there are quite a number of different molds in the genus Penicillium, this is far from being the only kind of mold that grows on bread; and b) there’s no telling whether a particular piece of moldy bread contains any active penicillin (which is not the mold itself, by the way, but rather a substance secreted by the mold); and c) a piece of moldy bread is, in all likelihood, harboring all kinds of other bacterial and chemical contaminants, which it is quite possibly not a good idea to go stuffing into an open wound. Besides… rather difficult, I should think, to arrange always to have moldy bread on hand, just in case someone should cut themselves? (Readers don’t think of these things; writers have to.)

CHICKEN AND MUSHROOMS in

Orange Sauce with Fresh Marjoram * 1 chicken breast per person (diced) 4—5 small mushrooms per person ** several spears of asparagus (optional) orange juice

chicken broth or bouillon

onion

garlic

marjoram

flour

salt

pepper

Use a deep cast-iron pan, ideally. Mince onion