I'm working on a lowish fantasy setting and I wanted to know more about medieval botany and alchemy or at least...

Mandrakes are great, a very common example of old herbalism folklore.

He didn't ask any retarded question?

You sound like a cunt.

Stop being a cunt.

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Medieval botany is better than modern pharmaceuticals for most things. Recipes change by location (because plants do) and there's no antibiotics.

i wanna fuck that carrot top

There are a number of Old English medical texts that might interest you, such as Bald's Leechbook or the Lacnunga. Might be able to find translated copies online. They contain things from charms and rituals to recipes which have actually been found to be potentially effective.

>Medieval botany is better than modern pharmaceuticals for most things.
Sure, I mean, modern pharmaceuticals are really only good for one thing (healing), and being > 1 is not that hard.

Medieval botany isn't good for the thing that pharma is, but it's good for way more (other) things:
- making soup
- summoning demons
- scaring superstitious peasants
- get a good stew going

Here's an interesting take on things; it might be a bit fantastical for what you're looking for, but still worth reading for some inspiration (especially the items, if you're looking for products instead of process)!

>middenmurk.blogspot.com/2013/05/alchemy.html

It's fantastical but also "realistic" in the sense that historically, "alchemy" was a highly symbolic and spiritual pursuit quite separate from peasants mucking about with plants and potions to cure haemorrhoids or whatever.

Probably also worth noting here that herbal medicine can be pretty practical, and isn't all quackery. Not everything people used before modern medicine was a placebo through mysticism: there are plenty of plants that work has prophylactics, coagulants for bleeding, easing symptoms of illness, etc. and studies to show that this isn't a concept for selling snake oil to 35 year old women who don't want their Western Pills.

But that's herbalism, not so much alchemy, either way.

>herbal medicine can be pretty practical, and isn't all quackery
Just as worth nothing that pretty much all working remedies are (or have been until replaced by more efficient stuff) also used by modern pharmaceuticals. It's not like every pill is born in a lab. Pic related is used to treat half a dozen illnesses.

There's not a lot of continuity, though. A lot of folk remedies were dismissed at the advent of modern medicine, only for them to later have been found to contain many effective ingredients recognised by modern medicine.

whoever wrote this writes like a massive sperg

That’s not even a little true. Modern medicine is like 150 years old, and the part you are talking about (abandoning things that worked in antiquity) was before the modern age of research based medicine.

No, it is a little true, because it is a fact that a lot of remedies were abandoned for being superstitious nonsense even though they actually worked. I might be wrong about the timeframe but it still happened.

The recent ones are probably the most accurate, but I really prefer the poetic language of the anonymous 18th c. renditions.

I'm with OP, this was a pretty dumb question user.

You don't fuck her, she fucks you. Bitch...

The vast majority of modern pharmaceuticals are (a) "active ingredients" of plants or (b) straight up garbage that got rebranded around a side effect at the eleventh hour to recoup research funds.

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Good example of a medieval concoction that, surprisingly, is actually quite effective:
medievalhistories.com/medieval-eye-salve-kills-superbugs/

The neat thing is that this particular example isn't just a simple matter of "this plant has a single active compound that modern pharmacy has since purified and improved upon" (as is the case for most herbal remedies), but specifically the particular combination and brewing method.

One form of herbal/alchemical medicinal preparation that was believed to be especially potent was the "spagyric". This was a method of herbal preparation in which an alcohol extract of the whole plant was fortified with mineral salts extracted from the calcinated ash of the same plant, as well as the plant's essential oils. This mixture was believed to be more effective than any one such component alone, because it combined three different principles of the plant according to alchemical theory: The fluid/melting (mercury) principle, in the alcholic tincture, comprising the very life essence of the plant itself; the fixed/incombustible (salt) principle, in the ash components; and the inflammable, active (sulfur) principle, in the volatile essential oils. These three principles of mercury, salt, and sulfur were pretty central to alchemical theory.