Handbook of Medicinal Herbs: Herbal Reference Library

James A. Duke

Jan 2018 · CRC Press

About this ebook

A Practical, Authoritative Compendium
This handbook catalogs 365 species of herbs having medicinal or folk medicinal uses, presenting whatever useful information has been documented on their toxicity and utility in humans and animals. Plants from all over the world - from common cultivars to rare species - are included in these 700 pages. The toxicity of these species varies, but the safety of each has been formally or informally questioned by the Food and Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute, Department of Agriculture, Drug Enforcement Administra-tion, or Herb Trade Association.

Easy-to-Locate Facts and Figures
Designed to enable fast access to important information, this hand-book presents information in both catalog and tabular forms. In the catalog section, plants are presented alphabetically by scientific name. (The index permits you to locate an herb by its common name.) A detailed sketch of the chief identifying features accompa-nies most catalog entries. For each species the following information, as available, is presented and referenced:

Family and colloquial names

Chemical content

Uses and applications - present and historical

Processing, distribution, and economic potential

Toxicological agents and degree of toxicity

Poison symptoms in humans and animals

Treatment and antidotes

References to original literature

Five Tables of Accessible Data
Given a plant species, you can easily determine its toxins; or, given a toxin, you can discover which plants contain it. These and other data are presented in convenient tabular formats as appendixes to the handbook. Other information contained in these tables include toxicity ranking and other toxicity data (as applicable), such as mode of contact, organs affected, and lethal dose; and proximate analyses of selected foods. These tables are titled:

Medicinal Herbs: Toxicity Rank

About the author

James Alan Duke was born in Eastlake, Alabama on April 4, 1929. He learned to play the bass fiddle in high school and began performing with Homer Briarhopper and His Dixie Dudes. At the age of 16, Duke played on a record that the band cut in Nashville. He received bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in botany from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He did postdoctoral work as a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and curatorial work at the Missouri Botanical Gardens there. He worked for the Department of Agriculture eventually becoming the head of the Medicinal Plant Laboratory. He was a pioneer in ethnobotany and phytochemicals. He wrote numerous books including The Green Pharmacy: New Discoveries in Herbal Remedies for Common Diseases and Conditions from the World's Foremost Authority on Healing Herbs, Handbook of Medicinal Herbs, and The Peterson Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern and Central North America written with Steven Foster. After retiring from the Agriculture Department, he occasionally conducted tours along the Amazon River and gave tours of his herb farm the Green Farmacy Garden. He died on December 10, 2017 at the age of 88.