Flora medica : a botanical account of all the more important plants used in medicine, in different parts of the world / by John Lindley.

  • Lindley, John, 1799-1865.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Flora medica : a botanical account of all the more important plants used in medicine, in different parts of the world / by John Lindley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    11/682
    4 PREFACE. There are probably few persons engaged in teaching Botany to medical students in this country, who have not experienced great inconvenience from the want of some work in which correct systematical descriptions of medicinal plants are to be found, and which is cheap enough to be used as a class book. By the author, at least, this has been so strongly felt, that he would long since have made the present attempt at supplying the deficiency had he been a medical man, or had he not hoped in each succeeding year that such a work would have appeared from the pen of some writer of reputation, both as a botanist and pharmacologist. This expectation has not been realised; the necessity that students should have access to a botanical account of the plants which furnish the substances used medicinally in different parts of the world, daily becomes more urgent; and hence the work now presented to the public makes its appearance. Under existing arrangements it is chiefly from systema- tical works treating of the British Flora, that the student of Botany derives his acquaintance with species; and as but a small number of the plants found wild in this country are either officinal, or of much medical value, he is practically excluded from any acquaintance with those important exotic species which it is most desirable for him so to study as to recognise them when he sees them. The student therefore who is really anxious to study Botany for those great purposes which render it so indispensable a branch of medical science, has been obliged to remain satisfied with such general knowledge as he can obtain