Medical Botany (1831)

About Medical Botany (1831)

The book illustrated the medicinal plants of the London, Edinburgh and Dublin pharmacopoeias, the official registers of drugs, and also covered Britain’s native poisonous plants. The text described each plant and its medical use; the hand-coloured engravings showed how to recognise it, some with separate studies of flower, fruit or seed.

The eleven plates here move between kitchen and pharmacy. Almond, olive, hops and chamomile appear beside the clove tree, the manna ash, whose dried sap was sold as manna, a mild laxative, and the copaiba tree, source of a resinous balsam. Henbane, a poisonous member of the nightshade family, stands beside hedge bindweed and the flowering aloe. In Berlin, each plate is made to order as a giclée print with pigment inks, on matte 210 g/m² fine art paper or 400 g/m² cotton canvas, from A4 to A0.