Euell Gibbons: Author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus

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People around here use strawberry leaf tea when they get to feeling down, when they bruise easily, when cuts refuse to heal, when their teeth start getting loose . . . anytime they develop the symptoms of scurvy and need vitamin C. Willow scrapings or strawberry leaf, rose hip or pine needle tea will cure vitamin C deficiency beautifully.

For that matter, you can hardly find a green plant that doesn't contain ascorbic acid—or vitamin C—and an amazing number of such plants can be found in the middle of winter. I've seen kids kicking aside the snow to get wild strawberry leaves. You can make your own cough and cold medicines but when it comes to cold remedies—natural or modern—I don't think any are much good. Take your choice: if you treat a cold with herbal medicine, you'll be over it in a week . . . if you go to a doctor, it'll take seven days (laughter).

I believe there's another advantage to herbal remedies—over and above drugs and vitamins—that we sometimes forget. With modern medicine we often try to get rid of family troubles by sending them out to a specialist. But when a member of the family takes the time to go out, gather herbs, bring them home, prepare them and give them to a sick person . . . it shows the individual that he's cared for, that someone is anxious about him and wants to do something for him. That, as well as the medicine, has a curative effect.

PLOWBOY: But there seems to be so much opposition to herbal remedies today.

GIBBONS: There is. Let me give you an example. I wrote in my first book about eating poison ivy leaves to gain immunity to the plant. I eat three of the tiny little leaves—that's one leaf with three little leaflets—when they're still red. "One every day in the month of May."

I've never had the slightest ill effect from eating those leaves and, since I've been doing it, I've never gotten poison ivy during the summer. I sometimes get it on my fingers in the early spring when I dig sassafras roots or something before I've eaten the leaves . . . but I no longer contract the ailment in the summer.

Now, although this old folk remedy works for me, I made it very plain in my book that I don't consider this a safe and settled scientific practice. I merely told the truth about observations on myself and other people who turned me onto the practice. Still, people—including Kingsbury, author of POISON OUS PLANTS IN THE U.S. AND CANADA —have written telling me my poison ivy experiment is dangerous because some individuals are extra-sensitive to the plant.

Kingsbury said that I should not have published the information at all so I wrote back and told him that every drugstore in this state—and in most states where there's poison ivy—sells pills against it . . . and those pills are nothing more than poison ivy extract. They're made from the poison ivy plant, they're taken to grant immunity and it says right on the box that if you start to to break out in a rush you should immediately stop taking the the pills and see a doctor. I told Kingsbury that I was doing exactly the same thing, only I was going out and gathering my medicine instead of buying it over a drugstore counter. He wrote back the most condescending, patronizing letter you ever saw in your life. He said, "Mr. Gibbons, you apparently do not understand that this immunity pill is never given to people until they're first tested for sensitivity."

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