Herbalists and medical botanists in mid-nineteenth-century Britain with special reference to Bristol.

A SURVEY of the providers of medical treatment in mid-nineteenth-century Bristol, based mainly on data from the 1851 census, showed the herbalists and their allies as a small but definable group.' They tended to live in the poorest parts of the city and in this, as well as in many other characteristics, they were situated at the opposite social pole to the opulent physicians. Their patients must have been drawn largely from the unknown poor and for this reason, if for no other, they should be worth studying: medicine has so commonly been seen from the perspective of the orthodox practitioners. The contrast was sharpened in the first half of the nineteenth century by the arrival from America of new ideas about herbal medicine which forced both the medical profession and the new herbalists to confront each other in extreme, and consequently revealing, postures. Against this background, the herbalists working during the two middle decades of the century in Bristol have been investigated.