referencebooks

Tyler's Honest Herbal: A Sensible Guide to the Use of Herbs and Related Remedies, 4th edition

By Steven Foster and Varro E. Tyler.

Published by The Haworth Herbal Press, 1999.

This is a 6" by 9" harbound book running to 442 pages including a summary chart and index, plus the prefaces to each edition and a section of full color illustrations.

The preface ends with this descriptive paragraph:

Tyler's Honest Herbal, Fourth Edition, is intended to bring scientific understanding of commonly sold herbs into the twenty-first century. Again, if we err, we do so on the side of conservatism. The current interest in herbs is consumer driven. Now that herb products are much more widely available, offered more often than not repackaged by marketing companies with no internal scientific knowledge of the substances they purvey, truth can indeed be stranger than fiction.

Opening the book at random we find the entry for Feverfew, which is two pages in length. The entry begins with a brief paragraph describing the history of the herb's use going back to antiquity, and then goes on to discuss the results of scientific studies that have tested its efficacy, potency, safety, and identified its active chemical compounds. Finally the article gives caveats to consumers and identifies some important questions for further research.

The book is honest where scientific studies of an herb's effectiveness have been less than conclusive, or when they have simply shown an herbal remedy to be ineffective for some of its traditional uses (as with Betony).

In the preface, the authors also say that this book is controversial among herbalists, some of whom don't like its scientific approach to what they see as a traditional art. The book fills a need, however, for a scientific guide to herbal remedies.