History In a Box

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Digging Deeper

For more information to understand when and how the collection was used, I sent my herb teacher, Michael Moore, a few pictures of the boxes and the transcriptions. Moore is the director of the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine in Bisbee, Arizona, and a scholar of the history of botanical medicine.

Moore estimated that this homemade “self-teaching kit” for a student of pharmacy was put together around 1915 to 1925. He explained that until the 1920s most students learned the profession by apprenticing three to five years with a professional pharmacist and completing home study.

He explained that students of pharmacy needed to learn the plants physically for two reasons. First, pharmacists needed to be able to identify and determine the quality of the plants they ordered and could use the samples in the boxes for comparison. They also needed to understand the medicinal qualities of the plant material so they could make their own medicinal compounds, which was more profitable.

In going over the boxes, I noticed that the useful plant bitterroot (Lewisia redivia) was absent, despite the pharmacy being located in the Bitterroot Valley, and I mentioned this to Moore. He said, “The collection is strictly pharmaceutical and has nothing to do with regionalism. It is an accurate representation of plants of the U. S. Pharmacopeia and National Formulary.”

Together we tried to decipher as much as we could of the box labels. One box was labeled “Cambogia” or “Gamboge.” Moore researched the names in Culbreth’s Manual of Materia Medica and Pharmacology, a pharmaceutical textbook from the early 1900s, and learned that the name, “Cambogia,” not in use after 1926, is now commonly known as gambooge (Garcinia gummi-gutta). I asked why the value of cactus (labeled as Cactus grandiflorus, an outdated synonym of Selenicereus grandiflorus) was listed as “doubtful.” He explained that the plant fell in and out of favor over the years. In the era that the boxes were in use, they made preparations from dried, expressed juice, but today only the preparation from the fresh plant is considered useful as a heart stimulant. On the box labeled “Capsicum, Cayenne” it reads, “Color-red-odor-charact. & stornatatory.” Moore explained the last word as a misspelling of “sternutatory” meaning it makes you sneeze. It was a warning to the pharmacist rather than a therapeutic recommendation.

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