Happy Earth Day!

[melannen]

So, what did you all do for the 40th anniversary of Earth Day?

I went to my area's Interfaith Earth Day celebration, and got a chance to shake hands with the Governor. And heard a talk from the bishop of the episcopal diocese of Maryland, as well as discussions about caring for Creation from an imam and a rabbi and a member of the local friends meetingand planted something with instructions from a master gardener, and drank some whole milk that hadn't been homogenized (for the first time in my life!), and talked about resources for local food in my area, and discussed rain gardens, and signed a petition for clean energy, and got all fired up again about growing my own food; I have a day off tomorrow and may spend it planting things. (They will all die by July, but at least I will have planted them.) Also, interfaith services *always* have the best songs, because they always end up going for the ones about the glory of Creation and how to live in it.

And then I sat down and worked on some long-overdue Fecundity Project posts.

In re: fecundity project, I just finally got a real old-fashioned herbal of my very own - the Dover reprint of the 1936 "Modern Herbal" in two volumes by Mrs. M. Greive, to be exact. It was $1 at a church rummage sale last week, and I am in raptures. Also, *utterly lost* - I thought I had a good vocabulary and was reasonably skilled at reading about folk medicine, and then I started this book. As part of my Earth Day observation I sat and made a list of words for things medicinal plants do, according to this book. How many of them do you know from this list?

Alterative, anodyne, antihelminthic, antiscorbutic, aperient, astringent, carminative, cathartic, demulcent, dentifrice, diaphoretic, diluent, electuary, emetic, emmenagogue, emmolient, excipient, expectorant, febrifuge, glairy, hydragogue, mucilaginous, nervine, purgative, sialogogue, stomachic, stypic, tonic, vermifuge, vulnerary

(and that's just from the A's. For the record, I got 13 right from that list.)

Comments

[copracat]

Okay, kind of guessing from reading them in context:

astringent - for cleaning
carminative - something to do with blood
cathartic - calming
dentifrice - tooth cleaner
emetic - promotes vomiting
emmolient - soothing, or with the texture of an ointment
expectorant - helps you clear phlegm from your respiratory system
febrifuge - decreases fever
mucilaginous - texture of mucous, like aloe vera gel
purgative - makes you vomit or has laxative affect or both
styptic - antiseptic
tonic - what you mix with gin to make a refreshing summer drink that protects from malaria.

How did I do? :D

I did think of making stuff up for the ones I didn't know. Also, my mum is a nurse. When I was little she had something called a styptic pencil which I just looked up to discover I am very wrong. Styptic is anti-hemorragic, but I'd assumed antiseptic because it was used on cuts. Assumption - so very much not a good thing!

I also looked up glairy because it sounds so awesome but ah, not so much.

[melannen]

astringent - makes tissues contract and dry up (astringent liquids are used, among many other things, in order to fake (or "restore") virginity. Now you know!)
carminative - encourages digestive gases (it doesn't say "makes you fart", but, um.)
cathartic - moves the bowels (There are a lot of these words that mean "gives you the runs", actually. I'm not sure why they needed so many, or if there are delicates shades of meaning I'm missing.)
tonic - makes you cheerful and full of pep and moxie! (which is what tonic waters were originally supposed to do, see.)

You got the others more or less, right, I think. "Styptic" does indeed dry up bleeding, but my herbal uses the spelling "stypic" consistently - I think it's just a variant spelling, but I'm not sure.

Glair is actually kind of awesome if you make your own paints! Glair+pigment is what would probably have been used to color the illustrations in medieval herbals. I hadn't seen it as a textural adjective before, though.

[copracat]

Oh, of course. Because eggs were used to make paint.

Perhaps that some diets left people prone to constipation?

G&T most definitely gives me pep and moxie. Possibly too much pep.

[rydra_wong]

I'm not sure why they needed so many

Stems from the same school of medical thought that led to bleeding people; laxatives were the other favoured strategy. If you're ill, you must have excesses of particular humours (or Bad Stuff of some kind), so you want to "purge" them, either by bleeding or laxatives or both.

It hung on for a long time as folk belief even after mainstream medicine had moved on; you could argue that it's still around today in the form of detoxes and cleanses and colonic irrigation.

[melannen]

Yeah, I get that purgation was a basic part of the pharmacopeia (plus, it was something you could do that actually visibly did something, which makes the placebo effect stronger even if the physical effect is harmful/useless.)

I'm just not sure why the same herbal needs to use about five different terms of art for the same thing. <_< Because she can?

[rydra_wong]

Because she can?

Because she's worth it! [/L'Oreal laxative ad]

Sorry.

*ponders*

Different derivations, maybe?

Some Googling suggests that "laxative" technically connotes a milder effect than "purgative" or "cathartic", so evidently there are subtle shades of meaning.