About this book
An Asian plant with mysterious cathartic powers, medicinal rhubarb spurred European trade expeditions and obsessive scientific inquiry from the Renaissance until the twentieth century. Rarely, however, had there been a plant that so thoroughly frustrated Europeans' efforts to acquire it and to master its special botanical and chemical properties. Here Clifford Foust presents the remarkable efforts of the explorers, traders, botanists, gardeners, physicians, and pharmacists who tried to adapt rhubarb for convenient use in Europe. His is an intriguing tale of how humans and their institutions have been affected by natural realities they do not entirely comprehend. Readers interested in the history of medicine, pharmaceutics, botany, or horticulture will be fascinated by this once-perplexing plant: highly valued by physicians for its cathartic properties, rhubarb resisted revealing its active chemical principles, had many widely varying species, and did not breed true by seed. This history includes sections on the geographic and economic importance of rhubarb--which explain how the plant became a major state monopoly for Russia and an important commodity for the East India companies--and a discussion of rhubarb's emergence as an international culinary craze during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Originally published in 1992.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. The Roots of Rhubarb
- 2. The Very True Rhubarb: The Seventeenth Century
- 3. The Russian Rhubarb Trade
- 4. The East India Company and European Trade
- 5. Collecting and Systematizing
- 6. Accommodating the Root: The Society of Arts and Other Promotions
- 7. Rhubarb as Medicine: The Eighteenth Century
- 8. The Search Ends?
- 9. The Testing of Rhubarb
- 10. Tarts and Wine
- Conclusion
- Notes to the Chapters, with List of Abbreviations
- Bibliography
- Index