Rhubarb - Clifford M. Foust - Hardcover

Clifford Foust's book is one of the most unusual I have ever read--quite innovative in concept and execution. It has taught me a great deal about early modern Russian history and medical history, but it also has much to say about the history of botany and horticulture, as well as international economics. Few readers would fail to find something of interest here.--John T. Alexander, University of Kansas An Asian plant with mysterious cathartic powers, medicinal rhubarb spurred European trade expeditions and obsessive scientific inquiry from the Renaissance until the twentieth century. Rarely, however, had there been a plant that so thoroughly frustrated Europeans' efforts to acquire it and to master its special botanical and chemical properties. Here Clifford Foust presents the remarkable efforts of the explorers, traders, botanists, gardeners, physicians, and pharmacists who tried to adapt rhubarb for convenient use in Europe. His is an intriguing tale of how humans and their institutions have been affected by natural realities they do not entirely comprehend. Readers interested in the history of medicine, pharmaceutics, botany, or horticulture will be fascinated by this once-perplexing plant: highly valued by physicians for its cathartic properties, rhubarb resisted revealing its active chemical principles, had many widely varying species, and did not breed true by seed. This history includes sections on the geographic and economic importance of rhubarb--which explain how the plant became a major state monopoly for Russia and an important commodity for the East India companies--and a discussion of rhubarb's emergence as an international culinary craze during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Foust, Clifford M. is the author of 'Rhubarb - Clifford M. Foust - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780691087474 and ISBN 0691087474.