CRC Handbook of Medicinal Spices 0849312795 - 03-Aug ...

[Pages:333]CRC HANDBOOK OF

Medicinal Spices

James A. Duke

with Mary Jo Bogenschutz-Godwin Judi duCellier Peggy-Ann K. Duke ? "Illustrator"

CRC PR ESS

Boca Raton London New York Washington, D.C.

Peggy-Ann K. Duke has the copyright to all black and white line illustrations.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CRC handbook of medicinal spices / James A. Duke ... [et al.]. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8493-1279-5 (alk. paper) 1. Materia medica, Vegetable--Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Spices--Therapeutic use--Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Herbs--Therapeutic use--Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Duke, James A., 1929-

RS164 .C826 2002 615.321--dc21

2002067412

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No claim to original U.S. Government works International Standard Book Number 0-8493-1279-5

Library of Congress Card Number 2002067412 Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Printed on acid-free paper

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Acknowledgments

Perhaps it is unusual to acknowledge one's coauthors in a new book, but I sure wish to acknowledge mine for their patience and perseverance with this new book. To Mary Jo Bogenschutz-Godwin for tidying up my most untidy first drafts, and for querying our database, after updating the database at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), working with my former USDA colleagues Jimmie Mowder, Ed Bird (deceased), and Quinn Sinnott. I am of course indebted to the USDA for maintaining the database these many years and to Dr. Alan Stoner for facilitating this. Readers of the book will realize the importance of the USDA database in shaping some of our new concepts and even for suggesting new indications for old spices. To Judi duCellier who, for more than 25 years, has quietly, and without complaining, struggled not only with my illegible handwritten notes, complete incompetence at the computer, quick reprioritizations, and now terminal dyslexia (double meaning intended), and produced useful documents that I mold into first drafts. To Peggy-Ann K. Duke, botanist and co-compiler, for closer to five decades, to whom both the world and I are indebted for her talented art, learned as a botanist while sharing with me the wonders of botany at the University of North Carolina, under out great teachers, alphabetically, Drs. J. E. Adams, C. R. Bell, J. N. Couch (who swore I could not be both a botanist and a musician; my music proves him right), Victor Greulach, A. E. Radford, and H. R. Totten, who kept us interested in botany. That interest is still today reflected, in the seven plus decades of Peggy's and my lives, in my Green Farmacy Garden in Maryland and the ReNuPeRu Garden in Peru which I started nearly a decade ago. It now functions fine without me, thanks to Pamela Bucur de Arevalo and the wonderful workers at the Explorama Lodges of Amazon Peru, where Peggy and I shared the turning of the New Millennium. Coincidentally, we may be leading a course there at the ReNuPeRu garden next year, teaching Latin Americans how to better grow and process some herbs, medicinal plants and spices covered in this book. As I have struggled with this book, I have had the marvelous luck to have acquired a new director for my Green Farmacy Garden, phytopathologist Holly Shull Vogel. In a sense, she keeps the Green Farmacy Garden alive through unfailing labors, too often all her own. She shares my vision of teaching America about the best and safest medicines, like some of the spices in this book. Illustrations for the onion, frankencense, cassia, cinnamon and cassia, garlic, bayleaf, and myrtle are used with the permission of Duke, J., Medicinal Plants of the Bible, TradoMedic Books, Buffalo, New York, 1983. All other illustrations in this book are courtesy of PeggyAnn K. Duke. Our thanks to those patient people at CRC who tolerated our frequent changes of direction, especially Barbara Norwitz, Sara Kreisman, and Joette Lynch. And to you, the reader, and your health, may the spices of life prolong and enhance the quality of your lives, saving you from what is believed to be America's biggest killer, Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR's) according to The Journal of the American Medical Association, May 1, 2002.

James A. Duke

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The Author

James A. "Jim" Duke, Ph.D., is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina, where he received his Ph.D. in Botany. He then moved on to postdoctoral activities at Washington University and the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis, Missouri, where he assumed professor and curator duties, respectively. He retired from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1995 after a 35-year career there and elsewhere as an economic botanist. After retiring, he was appointed Senior Scientific Consultant to Nature's Herbs (A Twin Labs subsidiary), and to an online company, . He currently teaches a master's degree course in botanical healing at the Tai Sophia Institute in Columbia, Maryland.

Dr. Duke spends time exploring the ecology and culture of the Amazonian Rain Forest and sits on the board of directors and advisory councils of numerous organizations involved in plant medicine and the rainforest. He is updating several of his published books and refining his online database, , still maintained at the USDA. He is also expanding his private educational Green Farmacy Garden at his residence in Fulton, Maryland.

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Contents

Introduction Abbreviations Catalog of Spices (A to Z) Reference Abbreviations References

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Introduction

You remember the days a decade ago when I celebrated the 500th anniversary of Columbus' "Discovery of America" and the Native Americans who had colonized it some 25,000 years earlier and been visited by Scandinavians a bit earlier. I believe Leif Ericsson also encountered Native Americans when he landed nearly 500 years earlier, up around Vinland, north of the United States. In reflecting the anniversary of Columbus' voyage, I often make the comment that Columbus set sail seeking black pepper and black Indians and instead found red Indians and red pepper, changing the cuisine and the medicine of the world and reshaping everyone's food basket and medicine chest significantly.

The travels of Columbus opened up one of the world's greatest exchanges of flora and fauna, and yes even germs, including some lethal smallpox germs, as well as higher plants (many never having been seen before outside America) and animals. This has laxly been termed the "Columbian exchange," the rapid movement, to and fro, of useful plants and animals, some for the first time, from continent to continent.

Frequently, the major producers of spices are not regions to which the species originally belonged, but areas of introduction as a result of the Columbian exchange of plants and animals around the world. I got very excited at what I learned in preparing my talk, Spice rack/medicine chest--Five hundred years after Columbus, presented under the auspices of Oldways in Spain the following year (Duke, 1991, 1992). Spices are important medicines that have withstood the empirical tests of millennia. New books come out every year embracing the time proven medicinal efficacy of one spice or another. Chile, garlic, ginger, onion, pepper, and turmeric are almost as popular, and deservedly sso, as medicines as they are as spices.

I'll freely dispense sage advice: Sage is an herb, not a spice! Herbs are tasty temperate shoots! Spices, barks, buds, seeds, roots, and fruits! That's why spices are much higher priced!

I'll not labor with the technical and varying definitions of spices as opposed to culinary herbs, but I summarized much of it in the verse above. Overgeneralizing, culinary herbs are temperate leafy shoots used culinarily to flavor other dishes. And I know of no culinary herb that lacks medicinal activities. (Mentha requienii is so small that it seems not to have evolved any serious medicinal folklore; its the only popular herb for which I found no published medicinal folklore.) And overgeneralizing, spices are more often tropical and involve other plant parts, not just the leaves and shoots. But there is no fine line between spice and herb, and furthermore no fine line between, herb, spice, food, and medicine. Chile, garlic, ginger, onion, pepper, and turmeric are all herbaceous in the botanical sense of the word, i.e., not producing any wood; they are all often included in the spice charts and statistics of the world; they are all foods; they are all medicines.

I have intentionally omitted from this book many of the better-known temperate culinary herbs. Anethum graveolens (dill), Brassica sp. (mustard), Coriandrum sativum (coriander), Cuminum cyminum (cumin), Foeniculum vulgare (fennel), Mentha spp. (peppermint, spearmint, etc), Origanum vulgare (oregano), Ocimum basilicum (basil), Papaver somniferum (poppy), Petroselinum crispum (parsley), Pimpinella anisum (aniseed), Salvia officinalis (sage), and Thymus vulgaris (thyme). These are clearly culinary and medicinal herbs, and all are carried in the USDA spice statistics. Most are also covered in detail and illustrated in Ed. 2 of our CRC Handbook of Medicinal

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