After Rome fell, medical learning in Europe survived largely in monasteries. Benedictine houses kept infirmaries and physic gardens, and copied classical texts. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), abbess, composer and writer, produced Physica and Causae et Curae, describing hundreds of plants and a holistic view of body, mind and spirit that has kept her in print for nine centuries.
The medical school at Salerno, flourishing from the tenth century, was the first in Europe and drew on Greek, Arabic and Jewish learning together. It admitted women — Trota of Salerno wrote on women's health. Its Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, a health guide in verse, was one of the most widely read books in medieval Europe.
Alongside learned medicine ran a much larger world of village herbalism, midwifery and folk remedy, carried mostly by women and mostly unwritten. Some of it worked: foxglove for dropsy, willow for fever, garlic for wounds. Much of it did not. The witch persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries destroyed a great deal of this knowledge along with the people who held it.
Printed herbals — Gerard's in 1597, Culpeper's in 1653 — brought plant medicine to ordinary readers. Culpeper's insistence on writing in English rather than Latin, so that people could treat themselves, made him enemies among physicians and a lasting reputation among everyone else.
Paracelsus (1493–1541) publicly burned Galen's and Ibn Sina's books, insisted on observation over authority, and introduced mineral and chemical remedies. He is also the source of the principle that still governs toxicology: the dose makes the poison. He was right about method and wrong about a great deal else, and he introduced mercury treatments that did enormous harm.
The nineteenth century produced the movement that this site descends from. Vincenz Priessnitz in Silesia built a water-cure establishment in the 1820s. Sebastian Kneipp, a Bavarian priest, systematised water treatment, herbs, exercise and diet into a programme still practised in Germany today. Louis Kuhne, Adolf Just and later Henry Lindlahr extended it.
Just's Return to Nature was read by Gandhi and shaped Indian naturopathy directly. The line runs from a Silesian farmer to Uruli Kanchan to the pages on this site.
This site is a personal account and a record of traditional practice, shared for information. It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and not a treatment for any disease. I am not a doctor.
If you are unwell — and especially if you have a serious illness such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease — please stay under the care of a qualified physician. Nothing here should replace or delay that care.