A well-known New York teaching physician, Fyfe bridged the gap between the
charismatic Ellingwood and the careful and sometimes arcane Felter in this
handbook, published, as were most major Eclectic medical texts, by Scudders
of Cincinnati.
The manual was intended for the physician in practice, with clear and rather
precise indications for therapeutic use. There is little of Felter's almost
encyclopedic listing of possible uses, rather the practical, centrist applications.
There is little dwelling here on the nature of the actual botanical (Fyfe
left that for J.U. Lloyd's texts), nor is there complex dosology (Fyfe relying
on the then readily available fluidextracts of the drug trade and the Specific
Medicines manufactured by Lloyd Brothers)...a good, methodical Materia Medica
for the clinical Eclectic-oriented doc of the turn of the century.
I have deleted the non-herbal agents, and purely medical herbs such as digitalis
and opium, reformating it as a thumbnailed acrobat file to be viewed or
printed "landscape" style, two pages across. I have included the
rather lengthy and articulate introduction, and added an alternative name
index, showing common names and adding current botanical names, where they
differ from those of Fyfe.
Besides the clarity of therapeutic uses, Fyfe's Materia Medica is also important
for the number of little-known but common American botanicals that he treats...such
"new" remedies as Ailanthus, Ambrosia, Catalpa, Clematis, Kalmia,
Oxydendron, Polemonium and Rhododendron...cool.
FYFE'S MATERIA MEDICA, (80 pages, 2 across),
Acrobat .pdf file, 5.5M