"Featured Acquisitions" Spring 2011
Friedrich Albrecht Anton Meyer and P. Castelli Titles

Maggie Heran, Executive Director

Reprinted from Lloydiana, Volume 15, Numbers 1-2, Winter/Spring 2011, pages 11-13

During the first half of 2011, the Lloyd purchased two historic books on significant and specific topics directly related to both its collections, as well as to an important principle of Eclecticism.

Medizinische Versuche by Friedrich Albrecht Anton Meyer published in 1792 by Dyk in Leipzig.

This book is quite scarce; it is found in only one other library, which is in Germany. The book is composed of three treatises, two on the medicinal properties of the bark of two different trees and one titled "Vom Tode," or "About Death," (a general essay describing the characteristics of the body after death) by Meyer, a doctor of medicine in Göttingen. [For the description of "About Death," I would like to thank Dr. Don Heinrich Tolzmann, German-American expert, for his assistance in translating the German black-letter text.] The trees, from which the bark is used medicinally, are Taxus baccata (European Yew tree) and Galipea officinalis, or Angostura trifoliate, both of which must be used with care since they are poisonous and deaths from their use have been reported in both historic and contemporary sources. Information on these trees is certainly not scarce today as they can be found in many encyclopedias and journals of natural products and phytomedicine, most of which are held by the Lloyd; however, there is little information devoted specifically to the therapeutic effects of these barks from the 18th century, although they might well be found in materia medicas throughout many centuries.

The medicinal use of Taxus baccata can be dated as far back as the 1st century CE when Claudius, Roman Emperor from 41-54 CE, suggested the juice of the yew as an antidote to a viper's bite. Many cultures throughout the centuries used yew for medicine, from the leaves for tea to the bark for powders; and, even the wood was thought to have healing properties. Europeans used it as an abortifacient and a cure for hydrophobia and heart ailments. An early mention of yew's effect on the heart was written in an Anglo-Saxon 10th-century leechbook, or collection of medicinal remedies (cited in on page 174 in W. Dallimore's 1908 publication Holly, Yew & Box). Meyer's treatise on the European yew is, of course, a common enough enhancement to the Lloyd's historic resources on plant medicine. It becomes more significant to that part of the Lloyd's collections specific to the development of Taxol® from Taxus brevifolia. In the 1960s, the National Cancer Institute began an extensive search of plant compounds with anti-cancer activity. The results of this search, culminating in the discovery of such a compound in the Pacific Yew, have been reported on in earlier issues of Lloydiana in reference to a significant donation from the Research Triangle Institute - the Soxhlet extractor used by Monroe Wall and Manuskh Wani to develop the effective compound. In addition, the archives of the American Society of Pharmacognosy, held by the Lloyd, have a wealth of information on the discovery and development by Wall and Wani. Although Meyer's book is on a different species than the one that gave us Taxol®, it adds yet more information on the history of the medicinal uses of the yew tree. Image of Taxus bacatta at right from: English Botany, or, Coloured figures of British plants, with their essential characters, synonyms, and places of growth by James Sowerby, 2nd ed., 1832-1846, v.7, pl. 1400.

The subject of the second treatise, Angostura trifoliate, sent me on a journey to discover how the bark of a tree native to South America and found most abundantly along the Orinoco river bordering on Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, came to the attention of an 18th century German physician. It seemed like a long journey, not only finding the answer to that question, but also because the nomenclature of this tree is a bit fluid with synonyms, different spellings, and changes throughout the long timeline of classification. Leaving the taxonomic question aside, I was delighted to finally discover, through Google searches and investigating leads in the Lloyd's resources, the answer about the tree in another 18th century publication right here in our library. Augustus Everard Brande, 1746-1834, apothecary to the English Queen, published Experiments and Observations on the Angustura Bark in 1791. On page one, Brande writes, "About the middle of the year 1788, a considerable quantity of a Bark, not before known in this country, was imported from the West Indies." There was some initial confusion about the bark's country of origin; although it was shipped from the West Indies, the officials at the custom-house entered it as "of African growth" It wasn't until two letters from physicians working in Trinidad were published in the London Medical Journal in 1789 that its true country of origin was identified. Drs. Ewer and Williams described the bark, which they called Cortex Angusturæ, and gave a favorable account of its effects. They claimed that its name derived from the Brazilian town of St. Thome d'Angustura. When another shipment was imported from Cadiz in Spain, Brande was convinced that the tree was native to South America. The later voyage of Humboldt and Bonpland to South America confirmed Brande's conviction of Angustura's origin. Image of Angustura trifoliate at left from: The Flora Homoeopathica by Edward Hamilton, 1852-1853, p. 5.

In a footnote on page 17 of Brande's book, he makes reference to a thesis at Göttingen by Dr. Meyer whose experiments and observations agree with Brande's in claiming the bark's use as a tonic and antiseptic medicine. In the same footnote, Brande mentions its use for fevers, often being used as an alternative to quinine for Malaria and other intermittent fevers. The Natural Medicine Comprehensive Database and many other contemporary phytomedicine resources held by the Lloyd state its current use for preventing recurrence of Malaria and for its anti-diarrheal and anti-spasmotic properties. It can also be used as a cathartic and an emetic.

Discorso della differenza tra gli semplici freschi et I secchi... Rome, Mascardi, 1629, by P. Castelli

This book is not as scarce as the first book and can be found in several libraries, but only in four U. S. libraries. Pietro Castelli, 1574-1662, was a physician, botanist, and prolific author, as well as the custodian of the botanical gardens in Rome and at Messina where he taught for a time. In one of his hundreds of pamphlets, Castelli writes of the cinchona plant and its curative power in cases of malaria, which is noteworthy as being the first Italian publication to mention cinchona. The Lloyd holds one of his books on Italian gardens, Exactissima descriptio rariorum quarundam plantarum, published in 1625 at Rome. This book itself is quite interesting with many beautiful engravings of the plants in a Roman garden.

This volume is of particular interest to the Lloyd Library, its history, and its founders. Castelli writes of the differences between the use of fresh and dried botanical specimens; although he also addresses cookery, it is primarily about their use in pharmaceutical preparations. During the mid- to late-19th century, when Eclectic medicine and pharmacy was a well-respected alternative to regular medicine, the Eclectics emphasized using fresh herbs in the manufacture of medicines, believing them to result in a better product than medicines prepared with dried herbs that can partly or wholly lose their medicinal properties because of being dried. John Uri Lloyd, a founder of the library, was an Eclectic pharmacist and supplied medicines to many Eclectic physicians. He advocated the principle of using fresh specimens as did all Eclectics. His thoughts on this can be found in his many writings, as well as those of his colleagues - all in resources held by the Lloyd; which makes Castelli's book a fascinating and very early look at the fresh versus dried debate as it joins hundreds of other, later books and journal articles devoted to this topic on Lloyd's shelves.

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