HealingWISE: International Database of Healing Herbs

Bringing back the pieces of a destroyed European tradition of herbal medicine

HealingWISE is an answer and an expression of sorrow over the violent destruction - obviously out of greed of gain - of the central European tradition of herbal medicine and at the same time the rebellious attempt to create an inter-cultural world-system of healing and make it available on the anarchic and free Internet.

In 1996 I began the healing herb project HealingWISE which in the meantime comprises of 425 entries. Plants and substances are categorized according to:

German Name - Gattung - Art - Family - English Name - Spanish Name - Sanskrit Name - Chinese Name - Mexican Name - Common Use - Homeopathic - Bach Flower Name - Bach Flower Use - Alchemical Porperties - God/Goddess - Chakra - Plant Characteristics - Ingredients - Rasa (Taste) - Energy - PD Effect - Effect on Dosha - Medical Effect - Weed Classification - Tissues - Body System - Indication - Precaution - Parts used - Preparation - Precautions in Pregnancy - Women's Dis-eases - Inflamations/Infections - Soul - Skin, Hair, Nails - Head, Eyes, Ears, Mouth - Respiratory Organs - Circulatory System - Digestive System - Musculoskeletal System - Children - Observations - Plant Number.

whereby the entries - depending on source - appear respectively in German or English.

Out of liability reason HealingWISE is published only in excerpts on the Internet (1) where herb names can be translated into different languages with a simple search mechanism (version 2000).

Various motivations

Will & life

I had several motives for this project. On one hand there was the question Why does a person want to die? (2), that moved me. Hereby I do not mean a suicidal, incidental, quick death, but rather the slow, agonizing dying-away we sometimes have to witness. It is the phenomena of a diseased person who somehow has lost his/her desire to live and with it the key to recovering health.

Medicine, the human being & stiving for profits today

On the other hand is my ongoing interest in alternative ways of healing (in contrast to the conventional, allopathic medicine) and its different, holistic view of the human being. In my eyes this different view may prove being an answer to some of the problems our current medical culture is facing, such as serious side-effects, an always sicker and sicker average population, collapse of health insurance systems, medical provision and medicines as a means to make profit.

Medicine, the human being & stiving for profits in the Middle Ages

As to my third motive, I would like to mention the history of the Middle Ages, to be more exact that of witch burnings during the Inquisition. Until then, knowledge related to herbs and healing lay in the hands of the healers: wise women, common women, neighbors, mothers, aunts. Health and healing were close to the sick person, medicine often growing at the doorstep or in the garden. With the opening of the first occidental medicine schools the freshly graduated physicians saw these traditional healers as serious (commercial) competitors, and over the years, achieved a radical, political victory; in burning the traditional healers as a witches, they were able to monopolize the power of healing very profitably.

The tradition of healing with plants has suffered much in central Europe. While other cultures (such as China or India) have millenniums of uninterrupted tradition, the Inquisition and later the liquidation of cloisters and their libraries destroyed, fragmented this knowledge in Europe. Today we stand before a gigantic tangled pile of pieces of a puzzle.

In a Babylon of broken and unbroken traditions

All these were my feeling when I started out on HealingWISE, the database of healing herbs. At that time I studied several books on different traditions of herbal medicine, that were written - to my regret - in different languages: German books on homoeopathic medicine; English books on Ayurveda; Spanish books on native American Indian healing and so on. Each tradition favored specific plants, but due to numberless names for each plant - not just dialects or common names, but also different words in different languages, it was an almost impossible task for me to make connections. Only when I consistently started adding botanical (Latin) names to all herbs did I find order.

In the meantime HealingWISE permits making connections between different traditions. Some herbs only have local meaning while others found entrance into many different medicine systems, possibly even as a extracts as in homoeopathic medicine or Bach Flowers.

This is an ongoing project.

About this table:

The following table is an excerpt of the HealingWISE project (1), which you can also open in an new window. You find a collection of herb names in English, Spanish, German, Chinese and Sanskrit, as well a their latin classification.
To use this table simply use the search function [Ctrl + F] of your browser and search for the herb you are looking for. Once you located your herb, you will find international names, digestive classification according to the science of Ayurveda etc. all on the same line.