Other sites with a lot of old herbal texts
- Michael Moore has old herbal texts on his SWSBM site. (You'll find the ones marked * as .html-files on my site.)
- Books: *Felter, *Ellingwood, *Petersen, Fyfe, Culbreth, and *Sayre,
- Periodicals: (*)Ellingwood's therapeutist, (*)American Journal of Pharmacy, *Transactions of the Nat'l Eclectic Medical Assoc.,
- and others: Other Manuals.
- David Winston has some old herbal texts on his site, including Felter's Syllabus and excerpts from Locke's Materia Medica.
- Archive.org is very good for old texts. If you do your searches with a "-google" you'll get only good scans in your results.
- Google books has a lot of scans, but they're abysmal. The scans are missing edges and the pics are gone. And if one or the other bastard slaps an ISBN on one of their scans and then offers it as an ebook on amazon (etc.), google removes their copy from public view.
You'd think a company as large as google could get their act together, but alas. - The Soil and Health Library mostly contains works off Michael Moore's and David Winston's sites, above.
Libraries
- The digital collections of the NIH (US National Library of Medicine).
Try a search for, oh, Dispensatory or Materia Medica, filtered by date range (here: 1850-1899). - The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford have made thousands of early texts available online.
A search for title: materia medica and availability: free gives 6 results, another for title: dispensatory (and availability: free) gives 10 results. The utterly English term "physick" gives 191 entries.
You can sort the results by date. Everything is from before 1800, and it's all OCR'd and spellchecked. - The digital collections of the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek of the Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf contains a lot of relevant top-quality scans.
A search for Materia Medica gives 736 titles, another for Dispensatory gives 98.
Or browse by subject. Try Arzneimittellehre (= materia medica), or Pharmazeutische Preparate (= formulatory), or Pharmazie (= pharmacy). There's even a section for Kräuter- und Pflanzenbücher (= herbals). - The Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé has a lot of great scans, primarily in French.
A search for Materia Medica gives 517 results, another for Matière médicale gives 176. Dispensatory gives 117 results. Give it a go, especially if you are fluent in French. - The Botanicus scans are exquisite. Botanicus' scans are browsable, searchable, and found in various downloadable formats on archive.org.
A search for Dispensatory gives 1 result, another for Materia Medica gives 10. - The Biodiversity Library scans are drawn from a number of sources, including Botanicus (above) and archive.org (also above). Try their search, the scans they have are very good.
- The Digitale Bibliothek Braunschweig also holds a lot of scanned texts.
A search for the title "Materia medica" gave 359 results, another for "Dispensatory" gave 0.
Single book sites
- Botanical hosts Maud Grieve's A Modern Herbal from 1931.
- Paul Bergner has translated Culpeper's names to modern terms. Find the book itself on, oh, Archive.org (see above).
- A Medical Botany of the Confederate States by Francis Peyre Porcher, 1833
- Kräuterbuch von Jacobus Theodorus "Tabernaemontanus" anno 1625 - 1600 pages, 3000 plants (they're still working on it - typing by hand, this kind of text can't be scanned), in German
- Part of Purdue's Newcrop site: The Herb Hunters Guide by A.F. Sievers, 1930.
- Plantaardigheden offers Rembert Dodoens' Cruijdeboeck, 1554, and Dodoen's Cruydt-Boeck, 1664, as images, larger scans, and text.
Last updated Mar2016. Comments? Tell me.
