Herb Notes
The Power of Garlic (Alluim Sativum)
By Louise Dunlap
I promised my editor that for April I would
write about "men's herbs," to complement last month's
column on herbs for women, but this put me on shaky ground. Women,
I think, seek help from herbs to balance our fluctuating energy
and to increase understanding of our relationships to our world
- and there is a traditional literature on women and herbs that
I have often turned to in these columns. Whether there are gender
- based reasons men seek help from herbs, and whether they, too,
feel special affinities to plant allies, I had no idea. To get started,
I decided to ask some male friends.
My question sparked some hilarity, and only
a little hesitation, at a dinner party. "Tomatoes!" two
friends shouted in unison, having just heard a radio report on this
vegetable.
"Garlic!" countered another, more
confidently, and that was the answer I kept hearing. A neighbor
and fellow tenant activist who's Peruvian says garlic and onions
keep him strong and healthy, while another says garlic (ideally
raw garlic) helps him combat nasal congestion. Don West, activist
and poet in the 1930s (who helped found the Highlander Center in
Tennessee), liked herbal remedies, "ate tons of garlic, and
reeked of it all the time" his biographer told me. "Yeah!"
quipped a friend named Reco who directs inner city youth programs
in Seattle, "Men like garlic because they want power"
(patting his clenched bicep) "and garlic represents power and
control." A lot of different claims seemed to be piling up.
I went searching for written evidence but couldn't
find the one book on men and herbs that seems to exist (A Male Herbal,
by James Green). Yet a great deal of modern herbal literature is
written by men, particularly the books that sum up what is known
about particular herbs. Somehow my attention drifted to one of these,
From Pharaohs to Pharmacists; the Healing Benefits of Garlic, (1994)
by John Heinerman, Ph.D. of Salt Lake City. I was fascinated with
the book and would recommend it as a birthday present for the man
in your life who loves garlic (with one reservation I will discuss
later).
Garlic's history and uses are diverse, and,
if Heinerman tells the story accurately, Reco's point about power
and control is not so far off center. In Egypt, garlic (along with
onions and leeks - other alliums that share some of garlic's oomph)
nourished the slaves who built the pyramids; in Greece, it healed
the wounds of Homeric warriors; in Rome, it envigorated gladiators
and enabled soldiers to march across the rugged, wintery Alps to
fight the Gauls. On a less warlike note, the anti-viral, anti-bacterial
qualities of garlic - even the fumes of cut garlic - were known
(and later transmuted into vampire folktales where the very presence
of a garlic clove defeats the demon). Ancient Europeans also found
garlic a relief for bites, burns, migraines, asthma, worms, and
bubonic plague.
Apparently there is chemistry behind the folklore
- garlic has a high sulphur content and a propensity, when cut,
to form a whole range of reactive compounds. Heinerman provides
documentation for garlic's effectiveness against a list of 42 afflictions
- from acne, AIDS, and atherosclerosis through colds and flu, fatigue,
and insect bites (including deterrents) to radiation sickness, toothache
and warts. Here he mentions that combat doctors in both world wars
used garlic to treat wounds when antibiotics were unavailable. He
tells the story of a dreadful toothache during a conference 2,000
miles from home. Rather than seeking out an unknown dentist, Heinerman
went out and bought a head of garlic and some peanut butter, jammed
a cut garlic clove into the hurting tooth and "cemented"
it with peanut butter. Within half an hour, he says, the pain was
gone.
And did you know there are at least 34 ways
to treat ourselves with garlic, from baths, to raw juice, to fermented
paste, powders, capsules, vinegars, soups, tinctures, enemas and
teas? Many sufferers, for instance, have found relief from tobacco
addiction by smoking dried garlic chips. Heinerman also includes
recipes from all corners of the world. (He doesn't talk about this
but garlic, which originated in western Asia or Siberia, must have
a fascinating history of intercultural transmission, perhaps blending
everywhere with local onion/garlic species, of which many are indigenous
on our continent.)
Heinerman has a strangely distinctive voice
- perhaps a bit tongue in cheek - especially when describing treatments
or maladies that don't usually make it into polite conversation.
For instance, he includes his precise formulations for slicing raw
garlic to slip into the folds of hemorroids before bedtime or a
French doctor's cure for impotence in the elderly by rubbing crushed
garlic on the tailbone. (Garlic works best at night, he says.) And
there are hilarious tales of people getting garlic cloves stuck
in various orifices - for instance a grouchy old Mormon elder who
used to stuff cut garlic up his nose to clear chronic sinus inflammation.
Women do not play much of a role in this book.
Few women scientists are quoted, although Heinerman cites quite
a number of informal experts who have written him about their personal
experiences with garlic. He also shows how to treat specifically
female problems, for instance yeast infections (with garlic douches
and suppositories).
Awareness of sexual politics is not Heinerman's
strong point, but that's not my reservation about this book. What
does one say of a work on the benefits of garlic that also goes
out of its way to reiterate the mainstream government framing of
the Gulf War? True, garlicÕs first recorded use in ancient Sumer
takes us to the same location, but do we have to read heroic language
about the liberation of Kuwait and the fearsomeness of Saddam Hussein?
Does Heinerman know that an estimated 125,000 civilians were killed
in this war, 60 percent of them children? I said this book would
make a good gift for male garlic lovers, but I wouldnÕt give it
to anyone attached to the mystique of war and soldiery - which this
book perpetuates without questioning. It's great that Heinerman
- and some of the friends I talked to - have a relationship with
the vitality of garlic, but power and vitality do not have to mean
war. These are issues my friends and I are rethinking and, who knows,
maybe reflecting on the healing powers of garlic will help.
Louise Dunlap teaches yoga and writing,
and is working on a book called Writing for Social Change.
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