Books in Brief

Green Medicine, by Margaret B. Kreig (Rand McNally, $5.95). “If you wish to drink much at a banquet,” wrote the Roman, Cato, “before dinner dip cabbage in vinegar and eat.” Cato wrote some while ago, but it turns out that Dr. William Shive, an American Chemical Society award winner, is today using a common amino acid found in cabbage juice for the treatment of alcoholism—and with good results. It is one of many fascinating items in Margaret Kreig’s book. The book is about pharmacognosy, the science of natural products, mainly plants, that heal. Field and laboratory discoveries are described, all in a journalistic style quite suitable to a reader unschooled in botany. Her approach may occasionally lead the author into careless error, as when she writes that members of the Native American Church “worship” the peyote cactus; still, one becomes terribly interested in the activities of pharmacognosists. Not all their plants are exotic. Compounds from daffodils, for example, may prove effective in treating multiple sclerosis; and buttercup juice stops the growth of strep, staph, pneumococci, and tuberculosis germs. One can hear oneself speaking of these things off-handedly at the next cocktail party.

G. M. PEPPER

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Green Medicine, by Margaret B. Kreig (Rand McNally, $5.95). “If you wish to drink much at a banquet,” wrote the Roman, Cato, “before dinner dip cabbage in vinegar and eat.” Cato wrote some while ago, but it turns out that Dr. William Shive, an American Chemical Society award winner, is today using a common amino acid found in cabbage juice for the treatment of alcoholism—and with good results. It is one of many fascinating items in Margaret Kreig’s book. The book is about pharmacognosy, the science of natural products, mainly plants, that heal. Field and laboratory discoveries are described, all in a journalistic style quite suitable to a reader unschooled in botany. Her approach may occasionally lead the author into careless error, as when she writes that members of the Native American Church “worship” the peyote cactus; still, one becomes terribly interested in the activities of pharmacognosists. Not all their plants are exotic. Compounds from daffodils, for example, may prove effective in treating multiple sclerosis; and buttercup juice stops the growth of strep, staph, pneumococci, and tuberculosis germs. One can hear oneself speaking of these things off-handedly at the next cocktail party.

G. M. PEPPER