David Hoffmann:
The Collector's Edition

Medical Herbalism

by David Hoffmann

With the demise of vinyl records and the passage of time, some of the best music by the great bands and artists of decades past is these days to be found in the thriving industry of re-released compilations of back catalog numbers, repackaged as collectors editions. These digitally re-mastered offerings which often eliminate the forgettable, essentialise the best, and add bonus features of previously unreleased material can represent a definitive statement of the artist's works. David Hoffmann, self-confessed aging Deadhead, Fellow of the National Institute of Medical Herbalists and past president of the AHG, would probably acknowledge some parallel with his recently published magnum opus Medical Herbalism.

It is hard to imagine that any student of western herbalism over the last twenty years can be unfamiliar with at least one of Hoffmann's books on herbal medicine. These range from his early pamphlet Physicians of Myddfai, to the Holistic Herbal, which has been in print in various incarnations since the early 1980s, and include a variety of titles on topics such as elders, stress, herbal informatics. Hoffmann is one of a small number of "bridging" herbalists who helped midwife the transition of herbal medicine from the twilight days of British physiomedicalism into its contemporary incarnation, catching the wave of renewed interest in traditional healing, natural medicine and the ecological movement that grew out of the radical movements of the late sixties.

After settling on the West coast of the USA in the late eighties, Hoffmann soon discovered that despite moving to the "land of the free", that he was not free at all as far as practicing herbal medicine was concerned. As he wrote in a letter to a UK journal - "I can get a license for a gun but not to practice herbal medicine". A seasoned political activist, he chose education as a way of changing the situation, initially joining the faculty of The California School of Herbal Studies, he began to spread the word about herbal medicine with a UK flavor. Since then, he has been consistently involved in a career of teaching, lecturing, running correspondence courses and publishing books about herbal medicine, reaching literally thousands, from inquisitive lay people through to many who are now established professional herbal practitioners themselves.

The publication of Hoffmann's Medical Herbalism is as timely today as was the Holistic Herbal in 1983. Hoffmann points out that herbal medicine is at a challenging cross roads in its development. His overarching concern is how the core wisdom of traditional herbal practice, now in some ways more appropriate than ever before to the needs of humankind and the planet, can be integrated with science. The models and methods of science drive not only modern biomedcine, but also increasingly dominate current western approaches to medicinal plants, from peer review research down to the marketing of popular herbal products. For Hoffmann, the refreshing, if obvious answer is that we have to recognize that politics is involved.

This is what crucially differentiates David Hoffmann's contribution. For him, defining herbalism holistically inevitably means defining it politically, as part of the progressive movement of ecological medicine. Throughout his text, the reader is constantly left in no doubt that while the spirit of herbalism lives, there is something seriously wrong with the way the world is trying to use it, and it is down to herbalists to put things right. Just as Greek root doctors were called rhizotomoi, Hoffmann says herbalists today should be called radicles, while the same sidebar suggests that the Plant Kingdom should properly be termed "kin-dom". Comments of this kind, in effect exhortations to think critically, are woven into Hoffmann's entire approach. Medical Herbalism certainly contains an enormous amount of useful information, but more importantly, it also presents the tools needed by students of herbalism for learning how to handle and contextualize that information.

As the author himself points out in the book, herbalism is at once simple, and yet staggeringly complex. The real benefit for the reader of this text is that over two decades Hoffmann's vision has matured to the point where this paradox can now be articulated with more clarity and subtlety, more attention to more relevant detail, laced with gentle often ironic humor but still retaining the passion of his earlier work.

Some sections of Medical Herbalism will have a familiar feel to those who already know Hoffmann's works, including the self-published Therapeutic Herbalism. But this version is really the "directors cut", with introductory material and philosophical commentary that has previously been confined to the classroom or conference lecture. The first part of the book contains significant amounts of new material, including excellent reviews of phytochemistry and phytopharmacology as well as a comprehensive discussion of safety, toxicology, and contraindications, particularly geared to the US context. The second part of the book starts with an outline of Hoffmann's model of herbal therapeutics, which, if anything, has become more explicitly physiomedicalist in his advocating the use of gentle herbs that tonify and normalize. The remainder of the second half of the book is a discussion of therapeutics by body system (not pathology), and a materia medica covering around 150 herbs (considerably fewer than in the Holistic Herbal). There are also several useful appendices, with glossaries, taxonomical tables, binomial/common name conversion charts and a good bibliography.

The author's decision to work primarily in education rather than in one-on-one clinical practice for the last few years arguably leaves some of the therapeutics short on current practical approaches. One cannot find any reference to insulin resistance, Syndrome X or metabolic syndrome for example. However, the strength of Hoffmann's overall "holistic" approach rarely leaves the reader without suggested direction. For example, several relevant aspects of the cell-biology of cancer are surveyed in the pharmacology sections of the first part, while the treatment principles given for approaching the cancer patient in the second part are sound, and based on a multidisciplinary mind-body-spirit model that sees herbalism as one component of an integrative approach to the cancer challenge.

It may be tempting to compare Hoffmann's Medical Herbalism with Mills and Bones' Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy. Perhaps all that needs be said here is that both are books that mark a certain maturity or coming of age of herbal medicine, and for today's students of botanical medicine each is an essential buy. The two are quite complementary in many ways, and are books that we should be glad have been written. It was time. For the authors, and for western herbal medicine, perhaps the most interesting question is - what next?

© 2004 Jonathan Treasure

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