Henriette Kress
Henriette Kress, known as "cyberspace's herbal archivist", [1] is a well-known Finnish herbalist who has developed one of the most encyclopedic noncommercial web sites on herbal medicine worldwide.[2][3] It contains archives on several public and nonpublic herbal forums, a photographic database of 8,000 botanical plant photos, and reprints of 20 major classic herbal works which had been largely lost to history. The reprints contain information on 4200 different plants, plus those not yet in the plant name database. (For purposes of comparison, a typical Chinese herbalist might use 300 herbs, an American herbalist 50–100 and a native Cherokee medicine man 800.)[4] The classic texts include major works like
- King's American Dispensatory
- Harvey Wickes Felter's Eclectic Materia Medica
- Finley Ellingwood's American Materia Medica
History of the herbal web site
Kress has been active on the web since 1992, and published her first FAQ on herbs for the alt.forklore.herbs newsgroup in 1995.[5] After the Medicinal HerbFAQ [6] got a good start Larry London (who had a collection on ibiblio) asked if she would do a FAQ for edible herbs as well. So in July 1995 Kress posted the first version of the Culinary HerbFAQ. Shortly afterwards ibiblio asked Kress to host a non-commercial herbal collection and ibiblio would provide WWW and FTP space at a time when private ISPs were prohibitively expensive. Henriette's Herbal Homepage was first published on ibiblio in August 1995 where it lasted until 2005, when it became too popular and moved to its current location. It is one of the oldest herbal sites online, with 47,822 html pages, 2.7 GB of information [7] and 187,000 unique visitors a month as of 2013.[8]
Biographical information
Kress was born in Germany and moved to the Swedish-speaking parts of Finland when young. She obtained a degree from the Swedish Helsinki University of Economics in 1991. She worked in finance and then left to study herbal medicine with Michael Moore at the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine [9] in 1998. She is a professional member of the American Herbalists Guild.[10] She lectures and travels around the world and practices in Helsinki, Finland.
Publications
Kress is the author of two herbal books in English, four in Finnish and one in Swedish:
- "Practical Herbs", 2011, ISBN 978-952-67575-0-6
- "Practical Herbs 2", 2013, ISBN 978-952-68025-0-3
- "Mintusta voikukkaan - käytännön lääkekasvit", Edita 2000, ISBN 951-37-3072-7
- "Hanhikista kissanminttuun - käytännön lääkekasvit", Edita 2001, ISBN 951-37-3425-0
- "Käytännön lääkekasvit", 2010, ISBN 978-952-92-7813-8
- "Käytännön lääkekasvit 2", 2012, ISBN 978-952-67575-6-8
- "Praktiska läkeörter", 2011, ISBN 978-952-92-8648-5
She is cited in four books in English on herbs, including Michael Moore, Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West, "The Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine on the Internet" by Lillian R. Brazin, "An Atlas of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease" (Encyclopedia of Visual Medicine Series) by Trevor T. Hansel and Peter J. Barnes and "An Herbal Internet Companion: Herbs and Herbal Medicine Online" by David J. Owen.
See also
- http://www.henriettes-herb.com/index.html Henriette's Herbal Website
References
- ↑ http://home.teleport.com/~howieb/ Howard Brounstein, AHG
- ↑ http://garden-gate.prairienet.org/teaching.htm Garden Gate Herbal Education page—website closed; see The Garden Gate: Teaching Garden (December 5, 2008, snapshot archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine)
- ↑ http://www.pitt.edu/~cbw/herb University of Pittsburgh herbal sources.html
- ↑ David Winston Cherokee Herbal Medicine Medicines from the Earth Conference 2001 01ME07 http://www.botanicalmedicine.org/Tapes/01me/01me07.htm
- ↑ The history of this site | Henriette's Herbal Homepage
- ↑ alt.folklore.herbs Newsgroup FAQs
- ↑ http://www.henriettes-herb.com/market/site-cd.html Site DVD page from Henriette's Herbal Website
- ↑ http://www.henriettes-herb.com/statistics.html Statistics page from Henriette's Herbal Website
- ↑ http://www.swsbm.com/HOMEPAGE/ Michael Moore Southwest School of Botanical Medicine homepage
- ↑ http://www.americanherbalistsguild.com/ American Herbalists Guild