Author: Carolyn Smith-Kizer

  • The Five Books on My Desk

    Why At Charlemagne’s Behest [ACB] Cites Liger, Estienne & Liébault, Culpeper, Dodoens, and Bauhin, and What I Actually Do With Them Every plant that reaches an ACB post has been checked against at least two of five old books before I write a sentence about it. This is the discipline the work requires if “recovering…

  • The Physician’s Eye

    Reading the Tongue from Galen to the Last Eclectics Before the stethoscope, before the microscope, before a blood panel could tell a physician anything at all, the body still spoke. It spoke through the pulse, through the color of the skin, through urine held up to the light, and through the tongue, offered up at…

  • The Body Still Keeps the Old Clock

    Light, sleep, and what it meant to live by the season For most of human history, the day ended when the light did, and the body still keeps the old clock. There was firelight, and there was the moon, and there was a great deal of dark. Nobody had to decide to “wind down” in…

  • What the Soldier Carries

    On bellis, yarrow, and the long memory of a plant soldiers carried into the field At a functional practice conference this year, two clinicians who work with special-operations veterans described a concept they call Personal Protective Nutrition and Personal Protective Lifestyle — PPN and PPL for short. The idea is simple: a service member faces…

  • Earth, Endotoxin, and the Humoral Body: What Traditional Farming Knew

    How Galenic constitutional medicine and modern immunology converge on the body’s need for the living earth Beneath the south-east quadrant of the parcel designated D478 in Clugnat, Creuse, at approximately eighty centimetres depth, lie the remnants of a Roman hypocaust system — the underfloor heating of a structure long since absorbed by the village’s geology….

  • The Four Galenic Constitutional Types or the Four Humours

    Galenic physic does not begin with a plant. It begins with a person. Before Charlemagne’s physicians reached for wormwood or sage, fennel or nettle, they looked at the person in front of them — and asked what kind of body this was. How did it run–hot or cold? How did it hold moisture or tend…

  • Essential Capitulare de Villis Plant List: All 73 Species Identified

    The botanical foundation of Carolingian herbalism: every plant in Chapter 70 of Charlemagne’s imperial estate ordinance, identified, classified, and set in Galenic context ~ the Capitulare de Villis Plant List. Evergreen Reference·Free PDF Download Below The Document Behind the Discipline The Capitulare de Villis vel Curtis Imperialibus — the “Ordinance Concerning the Royal Estates and…

  • Hildegard von Bingen’s Herbalism

    From Charlemagne to the 12th Century — and What Was Lost Between Hildegard von Bingen’s herbalism is perhaps the most frequently cited and least accurately understood figure in the contemporary Western herbalism revival. She appears on tea tins and wellness websites, her name attached to adaptogenic blends and ‘medieval wisdom’ skincare. She is claimed by…