Getting Back to Basics

Susan Vassar digging up the fresh comfrey root

The School got back to basics this week with a day spent harvesting comfrey root to grate to make a soothing poultice, and to try our hand at making a stiff support for fractured bones. We also wanted to make a ‘drawing ointment’ for splinters and boils using powdered marshmallow root and slippery elm. We used Priest & Priest’s directions from their book Herbal Medication: A Clinical & Dispensary Handbook. Since our pharmacy will be making most of our own medicines at New Place, we decided to step outside the well-worn path of making tinctures which most herbalists can do without much effort. We were intrigued by the recipes that practising herbalists used last century, and beyond. We have had inspiring conversations with AW Priest’s daughter who recounts the harvesting trips her father used to make with her as his accomplice. She learnt how to tell if Crataegus berries were ready for picking; if they weren’t her father would go back in a day or two. Sometimes they had gone ‘too far’ and he would leave them alone. This attention to detail and insistence of picking only the very best quality and at the very best moment is a skill we want to pass on to our students.

So, if you want to be a hands-on herbalist trained to run a clinical practice, contact us for an application form.

Cleaning the roots

Boiling the freshly grated comfrey root in a little water

This is the grated root after having been squeezed to extract the slimy juice

The gloop squeezed out of the comfrey root

After cleaning and grating the fresh comfrey root, we tipped some into a pan with a little water and put it on to boil. Soon it became a mush, a sludge, a mucilaginous porridge – which was just right… After we had let this mush cool for a while we tipped it into a muslin and squeezed the juice out. We moulded this mush round Susan’s index finger, just to see how it would work. She reported that it felt very cooling, and definitely stiffened up enough for her not to be able to bend her finger. This stiffness was increased after we spread the sticky gloop we had squeeze out over the top of the grated root. The small bits of root left on the work surface stiffened up so much they cracked when bent, the root applied to the finger was quite dense but hardened like bendy plastic and kept it shape when we peeled it off. We could see how this could be used to set broken and fractured bones by people who knew what they were doing….

So then; on to the drawing ointment. We used the recipe in Priest & Priest under Herbal Preparations section, page 149.

2oz cocoa butter

2oz bees wax

12oz olive oil

4oz powdered marshmallow root

4oz powdered slippery elm bark

We macerated the mallow root powder in the melted oil base for an hour over a hot water bath, then when cool enough we gradually added in the slippery elm powder, as Priest so eloquently puts it, ‘by trituration’. This makes, in his opinion, ‘an excellent drawing ointment for boils and ulcers.

Mixing in slippery elm powder to the marshmallow powder and oil ‘slush’

Scraping the bowl and filling pots

The finished drawing ointment, ready to be applied on pus-filled boils or deep splinters. It may not look like much, but it works…