For centuries, women have, with a practical, observation-based botany, taken up the task of finding remedies. Closer to the era of Bianca, women like Caterina Sforza and Isabella Cortese created and protected family recipes, developing strategies and unlocking secrets to find healing cures. In the case of my book, the secret is the herb, artemisia, and the medical enigma, malaria—an Italian word suggesting a commonly-held belief as to its cause—that the parasitic disease was caused by “bad air.”
Artemisia, an enormous genus of hundreds of species, is in the daisy family, Asteraceae. It consists of fragrant plants found in tasty cuisine, like tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus) or in landscapes, like sagebrush (A. tridentata), or in medicines, like mugwort (A. vulgaris) or sweet wormwood (A. annua). The rather dry nomenclature and basis for categorization tells us much about the classifiers—orderly scholars who created quite hierarchial systems of description.
In my book, Bianca’s artemisia defied classifications. Rather, Bianca is determined to observe the plant, in all its stages, in a science that is as much about the observer as the observed. For Bianca, it was an ongoing, lifelong project.
So, too, for Tu Youyou, who used classification systems and more for discernment and herbal discovery.
In 2015, she became the first mainland Chinese scientist to receive a Nobel Prize in a scientific category, the Physiology or Medicine classification. The prize had much to do with her pharmaceutical training and decades of work studying the artemisia herb and extracts and the anti-malaria factor, artemisinin, derived from them. Her research involved studying ancient anthologies of traditional Chinese medicine, as well as travelling into areas rampant with malaria, before she could reliably extract the active ingredient, what she called in the title to her Nobel Lecture as, “A gift from traditional Chinese medicine to the world.” In the later stages of my book, I was in touch with her lab.
Worldwide, scientists such as botanist Ruth Richter at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland practice a Goethean approach, using visual, tactile and other sensory perception to learn about the hundreds of pungent and bitter Artemesia annua representing a wealth of plant variants.
Learn more here, where you also can subscribe to receive chapters of the book, as well as favorite artemisia recipes!
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