Wild Medicinal Plants of the United States

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. This practical botanical reference brings order to the shifting names of America's wild medicinal plants, explaining how pharmacists, drug dealers, and botanists distinguished official from nonofficial drugs as the revised Pharmacopoeia pushed toward standardized nomenclature. Its focus is deliberately narrow and useful: commercially valuable native and naturalized plants, especially those traded as crude drugs, are cataloged with scientific precision. The entries read like a field guide to healing flora, pairing accepted botanical names and families with common and regional names, habitats, ranges, and the parts harvested for medicine. From balsam-fir, yarrow, sweet-flag, and white cohosh to witch-hazel, goldenseal, St. John's-wort, and jewelweed, the book surveys roots, bark, leaves, rhizomes, seeds, fruits, and balsams used in herbal and official medicine. Common weeds, woodland herbs, shrubs, and trees alike appear in this nationwide inventory, revealing the close overlap of folk tradition, commercial trade, and scientific botany.