The idea behind this series of blogs is that from time to time we will review books on health, healing, ecology and personal development that our followers might find useful.
Some of these will be newly published titles while others will be classic works – many of them published some time ago, so that our followers who may have missed them previously, will be able to catch up.
Others may be obscure works which at one time were classics in their field.
The first author that we are going to look at is Dr. D.C. Jarvis of Vermont. In America, Vermont is known as the “Green Mountain State” because of its huge expanses of evergreen forests. It is thought to be climatically one of the most unstable areas of the world. Situated just south of the Canadian border and Quebec, it has bred generation after generation of long-lived, hardy individuals well known for their longevity. Not least, in Vermont’s various claims to fame is its renown as a significant folk medicine repository.
When Jarvis, as a scientifically trained orthodox doctor took over a general practice in rural Vermont, he found that the Vermont men and women of the soil had a reputation for looking after themselves with family informed folk medicine. Initially in his practice Jarvis had thought that given time he would be able to bring the Vermont farmers round to his allopathic way of thinking.
However in reality, he found that his own medical approach was being influenced by Vermont Folk medicine and the locally used herbal medicines. Much of the latter had been borrowed from the indigenous First Nation people because when the early European settlers moved into various parts of the American continent, when they were ill, it was to their local native healers that they turned to for help.
This was how they discovered that Caulophyllum or Indigo was not only good for turning denim jeans blue, but was a great remedy of pregnancy and childbirth and was also an excellent uterine tonic too. Similarly, they found that Eupatorium perfoliatum or “Boneset” was as useful for homesickness as Caulophyllum was for melancholy and depression.
Jarvis from his earliest days in Vermont, would look and listen carefully while recording in his notebooks his own simple and practical observations. He would regularly speak to his local farmers and farmers’ wives recording their experiences both as adult men and women, but also recording their experiences as parents and in animal husbandry.
As time passed, Jarvis as well as his observing and recording, began to incorporate aspects of Vermont nature cure into his own practice. He was by no means the only person adding native American herbal cures into their medicine because in both the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many native American herbal cures were finding their way into the homeopathic materia medica textbooks and colleges.
It was against this background that Jarvis went on to write the two classic works that he is so well known for today. The first of these is simply called “Folk Medicine”.
A doctor’s lifetime study of nature’s secrets” published in 1960, Jarvis’ publisher’s blurb adds to this disarmingly simple title by also describing it as “The cider vinegar & honey way to health”, as well as pointing out to us how this work had absolutely swept America.
Jarvis saw his second Book Arthritis & Folk medicine published in 1961 and although it is a little more specialised than the earlier “Folk Medicine,” it still remains a useful work today.
Jarvis who became a fixture as a Vermont General practitioner and a herbal medicine enthusiast saw this second book “Arthritis and folk medicine” become another classic study.
A great deal of Jarvis’ observing and note taking concerned pregnancy and birthing, both in animals and humans, Jarvis noting that with both of these groups, individuals who had been taking cider-vinegar and honey when pregnant, would often have an easier pregnancy and an easier birth experience than others. Jarvis also noted that honey and cider-vinegar fed calves could be on their feet five minutes after being born and feeding within thirty minutes of birth. Jarvis, like the scientist that he was, continued to monitor these same calves, sometimes for years on end and found that in their adult life they were larger and heavier than the average milk-herd animal. Also when they grew into being milk-herd cows themselves, their milk yield was commonly higher than the average.
All of this has to suggest that cider-vinegar and honey medicine may still have something to offer us. And even today, long after Jarvis’ time in Vermont, cider-vinegar is still a popular health food shop staple though it has to be the “Mother” version for health and healing purposes!
Find the book online at Amazon. Link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Folk-Medicine-Natural-Remedies-Everyday/dp/0330489682