There is a plant growing right now in roadside ditches, abandoned lots, and garden edges across Europe and North America. Its roots reach down ten feet (three meters) into the earth, pulling up potassium, nitrogen, and calcium that surrounding plants cannot access. Its leaves contain two to three times more potassium than farmyard manure. Cut it to the ground and it grows back within weeks, ready to be cut again four or five times a season, year after year, without a single application of synthetic fertilizer. The global synthetic fertilizer industry is worth over two hundred thirty billion dollars a year. This plant does much of what that industry does, for free, indefinitely. But that is only half of what it can do. Medieval physicians discovered that this same plant accelerates the healing of broken bones so effectively they gave it a name that survived a thousand years. And then it was erased from the pharmacopoeia. The question nobody asks is what the science actually found before it disappeared.
The plant is comfrey. Symphytum officinale. And the story of what happened to it tells you more about modern medicine and modern agriculture than either industry would like you to know.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are subject to deletion if they are not germane. I have no problem with a bit of colourful language, but blasphemy or depraved profanity will not be allowed. Attacks on the Catholic Faith will not be tolerated. Comments will be deleted that are republican (Yanks! Note the lower case 'r'!), attacks on the legitimacy of Pope Leo XIV as the Vicar of Christ, the legitimacy of the House of Windsor or of the claims of the Elder Line of the House of France, or attacks on the legitimacy of any of the currently ruling Houses of Europe.