Handbook of Medicinal Herbs

By the time this second edition is published, the first edition of the Handbook of Medicinal Herbs
will have been out more than 15 years. The second edition is designed to present most of the old
information plus new information on the more important of those original 365 herbs. I submitted
the first edition under the original unpublished title, Herbs of Dubious Salubrity. I intentionally left
out many of the completely safe culinary herbs, spices, and food plants that are clearly medicinal.
I also intentionally omitted some strictly dangerous herbs, such as foxglove, that were too unhealthy
for use in unskilled hands. I did include several obscure hallucinogenic plants of dubious salubrity.

I did, or should have, dropped some of these because they have little medicinal importance. Some
poorly documented species, such as Mimosa hostilis and Phoradendron leucarpum, for example,
were retained with fragmentary entries, so as to at least mention species from the first edition that
might better have been dropped.




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