This one deserves an entry to itself (as opposed to just an addition to the Links page).
Vilma Bharatan of London’s Natural History Museum has been working for a number of years on a database of plant/funghal names in homeopathy, translating them to their modern equivalents. Her work was published in book form in 2002, but the updated and expanded database is now online, freely accessible and searchable.
From the site:
“Homeopathic remedies have accumulated gradually over the past 200 years. During this time, the plants and fungi in the various Homeopathic Materiae Medicae have received a variety of epithets, although these are mostly Latin names. Often, the naming of these plant remedies has not followed any recognised botanical or medical code and, despite having some resemblance to the modern botanical system, nearly half of these names needed updating with respect to the current International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN; Greuter et al ., 2000; McNeill et al., 2006). In response to this problem, of outdated and often inaccurate nomenclature, a new checklist was prepared (Bharatan et al ., 2002; Bharatan and Humphries, 2002). This checklist together with the online searchable database can be updated in line with the revisions of the Botanical Code that take place every 6 years.”
Tags: Natural History Museum, Plant names in homeopathy, Vilma Bharatan
