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medpundit |
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Tuesday, July 23, 2002Myddfai is a village in South Wales. Here, in the early thirteenth century, a physician named Rhiwallon founded a line of doctors that spread across Wales and persisted for hundreds of years - some Welshmen still claim descent from the physicians. Legend has it that Rhiwallon's mother was a lake fairy who told him which plants had medicinal uses and where they could be gathered. The Myddfai's most important text, the Red Book of Hergest, dates from around 1400. It describes nearly 500 remedies for ailments such as deafness, lumps and fever, derived from more than 200 plants. One of the plants the Myddfai used was foxglove, which gives us a drug we still use today for heart conditions, digitalis. (Although now we use the more reliable synthetic version, digoxin.) posted by Sydney on 7/23/2002 08:12:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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