How did I get into Herbal Medicine?

I was an unlikely candidate to apply for University. I had small children to care for during the day, I had a self-employed husband who needed support, I was just recovering from major surgery, and I was 43.

The common expression for a woman like me is, I believe, a ‘kept woman’. I had never worked during our marriage – I had not needed to. Instead I had looked after our babies, taken care of the house and garden, and baked up a storm on my beloved 4-oven Aga.

But as I entered middle age I began to wonder: what if?

What if I had gone to University? What if I had developed a career? I began to look into the future when my children didn’t need my constant care. I began to see a space that I could fill…

I had always been interested in social history, especially one important point. What did mothers do with ill children before the establishment of the NHS? The more I looked into the sort of home remedies that they would use, the more interested I became. Then two things happened;

1.     I heard an interview on BBC Radio 4 while I was washing up at the sink and daydreaming. There was a Medical Herbalist talking about his work, and it became clear that far from being quaint necessities that woman had been forced to resort to before 1948, herbs were part of a proper, systematic form of medicine that was still used today. And one that people were still trained in.

2.     I read a glossy women’s magazine which had a piece on alternative therapies. One of them was about herbal medicine. A woman recounted her story; she had a chronic illness over many years that the NHS couldn’t resolve. In the end her GP had just put her on a permanent prescription of steroids which had had some nasty side effects. She went to see a herbalist and was cured in 6 months. So impressed was she with her treatment and recovery that she trained to be a herbalist herself. She even [very helpfully] gave the address of her professional body which oversaw the training.

Reader, what do you think I did?

I was on that phone, and applying to University before you could say chamomile.

Suffice it to say that I could only apply for the degree course after I had completed their foundation year in Chemistry and Biology. And I could only apply for their foundation year after I had taken Chemistry GCSE. So, after I had sat my Chemistry GCSE exam at the local 6th form college I collected my results on the same day as one of my sons. I then spent a year doing Chemistry and Biology at foundation level. I then spent 4 years doing a science-based degree in herbal medicine. I graduated when I was 51.

One of the people that I dedicated my Dissertation to was the babysitter…

I am now 66 years old. I have a herbal medicine practice where I see patients, with a herb garden attached for me to grow as many of my own herbs as I can. My education has been a great help to my husband who developed Parkinson’s soon after I qualified. I can help his quality of sleep, his stiff muscles, and his dyskinesia.

A few years after I qualified I completed a 2 year teaching qualification, and then a 2 year course with the RHS. And then I started a training school for medical herbalists with a colleague who had trained with me. She is an academic with a PhD from Oxford, so I left most of the academic structure to her. Our school is in its 8th year of providing a 6 year course, it is degree level but we have to call it an Advanced Diploma because we are not a University. We have written 36 module descriptors, and several due diligence documents.

Our pipe dream is starting a herbal hospital/convalescent home, but we mustn’t run before we can walk. 

Recently the school was awarded charitable status.

My colleague is 67. Somehow, running this school has given us a new lease of life. It gave me confidence to study [and pass] a stiff online course with Duke’s University in the USA in Medical Neuroscience.

Middle-aged women can so often feel that they have nothing to offer, but we feel that we are in the prime of life and our sails are set fair…