Description

The author of Stalking the Healthful Herbs brings to our attention in a delightful fashion many of the culinary and medicinal herbs native to North America-kinds that were well known to the Indians and early settlers. His intimate knowledge of these plants is based on countless field studies as well as on painstaking research. One clearly gets the feeling that he writes of what he knows and of what he has learned from endless experience and experiment.
GINSENG! The very name sings of romance, and this lowly plant has a more romantic history than any herb I know. Confucius praised its curative powers more than 2,000 years ago, and it has remained central in the Chinese materia medica ever since, and is added to many of their favorite prescriptions even today. For centuries the Chinese obtained ginseng from Manchuria, Chinese Turkestan, and Korea, but gradually the supply was depleted and prices rose to fantastic levels. This was the Asiatic species, Panax schinseng- Panax from the same root as panacea, a cure-all, and schinseng,from which we took our word, ginseng, being the Chinese name for
the highly-valued medicinal root of this plant.Schinseng, in Chinese, means man-form, or man-shape, for the small root of ginseng often divides at the bottom into two leg-shaped forks, and sometimes has arm-like side roots higher up, resembling a tiny man in some grotesque posture. Some scholars ascribe the value
placed on this root to the old doctrine of signatures, conjecturing that ancient medicine men interpreted its man-shape to mean that it would be a good medicine for man to take. This may have been true
in the dim, primitive past, but the modern, educated Chinese of Formosa, Macao, Hong Kong, or Singapore still value the root as highly as did their honorable ancestors, and will pay a higher price
for it than for any other drug on the market.