Key Takeaways:

• Traces Western herbal medicine from ancient and medieval herb-wives and physicians through its suppression under scientific biomedicine. SAGE Journals
• Shows how professional politics, religion, and state power repeatedly pushed herbalism to the margins, even when it remained popular among ordinary people.
• Highlights 19th–20th-century revivals and the emergence of modern phytotherapy, connecting today’s herbal renaissance to long-running struggles over who controls healing knowledge.
• Helps health-food readers see herbalism not as a new fad, but as an old tradition cyclically exiled and reclaimed.

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