Brinkmanship

Complete Herbs, Complex Medicines:
A merger of Eclectic and Naturopathic Visions of Botanical Medicine

by Francis Brinker

Brinker's Complete Herbs and Complex Medicines is a thoughtful, intelligent and timely work, an important contribution to the herbal literature, which in its coverage of the philosophical and theoretical issues that confront botanical medicine today arguably ranks alongside Weiss's classic Lerbuch der Phytotherapie.

Dr Brinker has a long association with Eclectic Medical Publications (EMP), who are best known in the herbal community for making available facsimile reprint editions of King's, Felter, Ellingwood, Scudder, among others. Dr Brinker in turn is best known for his previous titles on toxicology, as well as on contraindications and herb-drug interactions, works which involved compiling and evaluating prodigious amounts of research. However, in Complete Herbs Complex Medicines it is not on-line citation databases but Eclectic medicine, particularly the vitalist pharmacy of John Uri Lloyd, that Brinker uses as the foundational research of the book.

The text is divided into two parts - the first half is an extended discussion of the nature of herbal medicines, theoretical in approach but rooted in the specifics of pharmacy. This part of the book uses extensive quotations and extracts from Lloyd's pharmaceutical writings, as Brinker boldly addresses a series of fundamental questions such "What is a herb?', 'What is an extract?', 'What is standardization?' , and last but far from least, "Where are we headed?". Quoting Lloyd, Brinker carefully unravels the various forms of herbal preparation, pointing out their differences, explaining how each may have its appropriated sphere of relevance and administration, according to the nature of the herb itself, its chemical composition, as well as the intended use for an individual patient. Brinker 's underlying agenda throughout is to argue that proper understanding and appreciation of the complexity of botanicals and the transformative effects of different forms of pharmacy on the medicine itself are an essential prerequisite to understanding their clinical application. This is of course in complete opposition to the popular "complete-herbal-information-foot-notes-for-pharmacists in a week-end" type of approach, and resonates with Weiss's argument that physicians must intimately understand the plants from which medicines are made before they can use them effectively.

Generally non-partisan, when push comes to shove, Brinker appears to somewhat favor freeze-dried fresh herb material, suggesting that it may most effectively capture and preserve the medicinal properties of the plant as harvested. The author's extensive reliance on John Uri Lloyd's work may seem overenthusiastic at times, but it is hard not to marvel at the persistent contemporary relevance of Lloyd's writing, such as his seminal paper "Quality versus Quantity". Readers who are as familiar with Physiomedical as they are with Eclectic sources may raise an eyebrow at Brinker's exclusive concentration on the latter. This is particularly the case where the author discusses the basic concepts and definitions of food, medicine and poison. The outstanding discussion of food, medicine and poison in Western herbal medicine is to be found in Thurston's 1900 text Philosophy of Physiomedicalism; surely the insights of the physiomedicalists are as critical to modernizing herbal medicine as are those of the Eclectics.

© 2004 Jonathan Treasure

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