An essential guide and invaluable resource for anyone interested in herbal medicine, Australian flora, and the indigenous Australian culture. Plants have been used for medicinal purposes since earliest recorded history and Australia's varied flora provided Aboriginal people with medicines. With the arrival of Europeans much of this knowledge was overtaken by modern drugs and techniques, but today there is a revival of interest in traditional medicines. Australian Medicinal Plants covers the Aboriginal use of native plants and explains how the first settlers learned from the Aborigines their medicinal values. There is information on nearly 500 individual plants, how they were used, what their known pharmacological constituents are, where to find them, and how to prepare remedies. The species are helpfully arranged in chapters according to their use: for fevers, painkillers, antiseptics, and digestive disorders for instance.
About the Author: Erich V. Lassak: Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on 11 April 1934; died in Sydney, Australia, 3 Aug 2015. He left Europe in 1950 and lived for 5 years in Ethiopia before migrating to Australia in 1955. After working for several years in the chemical industry he joined in 1964 the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney. From then on he involved himself almost exclusively in the study of the chemical constituents of Australian native plants. He has been president of the Australian Society of Perfumers and Flavorists, as well as Chairman of the Essential Oil Committee of the Standards Association of Australia, and from 1979 he has been Senior Research Scientist at the Biological and Chemical Research Institute of the N.S.W Department of Agriculture. Dr. Lassak is a graduate of the University of New South Wales where he obtained the degree of Ph.D in 1972. He was later an Honorary Research Associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, NSW, where he worked on chemotaxonomic studies on the essential oils of the NSW indigenous flora and on dangerous cycads. Tara McCarthy was born January 4, 1939 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, the first child of two Washington, D.C. journalists from the Washington Post. The first of five children, Tara attended the Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. A born naturalist, Tara co-authored a seminal work on Aboriginal medicinal plants: Australian Medicinal Plants with E.V. Lassak. Died in 2003.