A01=Clifford M. Foust
Active ingredient
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Agriculture
Arkhangelsk
Augustine Henry
Author_Clifford M. Foust
automatic-update
Baillon
Battle of Culloden
Bureaucrat
Carl Linnaeus
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=MBX
Category=MMG
Central Asia
Chloroform
Constipation
COP=United States
Cultivar
Cultivator
David Don
Decoction
Delivery_Pre-order
Disease
East Indiaman
Economic botany
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
Food and Drugs Act
Galdan Tseren
Gardening
Glucoside
Gustave (crocodile)
Herbals
Herbarium
Horticulture
Jalap
John Bartram
John Uri Lloyd
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Kitchen garden
Ladoga Canal
Language_English
Laxative
Lincoln's Inn Fields
Market garden
Martin Lister
Meconium
Medicinal plants
Mekong
Out of Season (short story)
Oxfordshire
PA=Temporarily unavailable
Pastry
Patung
Petroleum ether
Pharmacology
Pharmacopoeia
Physician
Price_€100 and above
PS=Active
Quantity
Recipe
Rheum
Rheum officinale
Rhubarb
Rhubarb pie
Ruble
Russian-American Company
Saint-Domingue
Samuel More
Smallpox
softlaunch
Sugar refinery
Supercargo
Tannin
The Other Hand
The Physician
Thomas Dimsdale
Tincture (heraldry)
Treatise
Vegetable
Vomiting
West of England
Yunnan
Product details
- ISBN 9780691630533
- Weight: 709g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Apr 2016
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
