Abstract

As a child in the 50s and later as a medical student in the 70s, my first exposures to the area of nonconventional, complementary and alternative healing were home remedies. The vitamins, salves, elixirs, nutritional supplements, and Polish peasant foods prescribed by my mother later intersected powerfully with natural remedies offered by my medical school mentor, Dr. Kenneth Kessel. Ken had been a pharmacist before becoming a family doctor and a part of his practice required meeting the needs of European immigrants in the Chicago area who imported their herbal remedies with them. They expected their pharmacist to stock them, and he did. Those were the days when pharmacists still had courses in pharmacognosy to learn and understand the healing powers of plants. Besides bottles of pills to count and dispense, the pharmacy still had drawers and jars with plant materials and herbs that required the mortar and pestle, a scale, extracting solvents, flavorings, and other special ingredients and skills of the compounding pharmacist.