Aromatherapy Workbook

No-one can say for sure whether the extraction and use of aromatic material began in India or Egypt – suffice it to say that in both these countries the use of plants was, for thousands of years, an important part of their culture.

The Indian Story

In India the use of plants and plant extracts as medicines has been continuous from at least 5,000 years ago up to the present day. Ayurvedic medicine, as it is called, is unique in this respect, and one of the oldest known books on plants, Vedas, is Indian. This book not only mentions many aromatic materials, such as sandalwood, ginger, myrrh, cinnamon and coriander but also indexes the various uses of these plants for religious and medicinal purposes. Ayurvedic medicine, however, remained mainly confined to the area where it developed until fairly recently.

The Influence of Egypt

More is known about the development of plant use in Egypt and the surrounding Mediterranean countries; in fact the Nile valley became known as the Cradle of Medicine and among the plants brought to this area were cedarwood, frankincense, myrrh and cinnamon.

In Egypt 5,000 years ago, perfumery was so closely linked with religion that each of the gods was allotted a particular fragrance, with which their statues were sometimes anointed. It was the priests who formulated the aromas and the Pharaohs of the time asked them for perfumes with which to anoint themselves in times of prayer, war and love.

The Egyptians mainly used fats or waxes to extract the fat- or wax-soluble molecules from the plant material, and jars containing these aromatic unguents feature on many of the paintings in the Egyptian tombs.

To prepare an essence from cedarwood for hygienic use, and also for embalming, wood was heated in a clay vessel and covered with a thick layer of wool. The wool gradually became saturated with cedarwood oil and condensed steam; it was then squeezed, and the two substances were left to separate out. Here we can see the crude beginnings of distillation.

The Egyptians used plants, aromatic resins and essential oils in the process of embalming (prevention of the rotting and decay of once living tissue). They successfully preserved animals as well as humans by this method and the priests forecasted (correctly, as it happened!) that these bodies would last for at least 3,000 years.

Egyptian knowledge with respect to antisepsis and hygiene, so effectively demonstrated by mummification, meant that their influence has been felt right up to this century. In ancient Egypt the architects were among the leading scientists and Imhotep (who lived around 2750 BC) helped to initiate Egyptian medicine. One town, designed by Akhnaton’s architect, was built with large square spaces for the burning of herbs, to keep the air germ-free. In the hot climate and with a lack of proper sanitation, the use of aromatic substances made life more pleasant – and safer.

Egypt and India were not the only countries to develop the use of aromas for religion and medicine (each country adapting them for their own particular requirement); the Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Jews, Chinese, Greeks, Romans and eventually the Christians all burnt resins in religious mystic and purification ceremonies.

Greece’s Contribution

About four or five hundred years before Christ, doctors from Greece and Crete visited the ‘Cradle of Medicine’ and as a result a medical school was set up on the Greek island of Cos, subsequently famous through the presence of Hippocrates (460–370 BC), who later became known as the ‘Father of Medicine’.

A Greek, Megallus, formulated a perfume called ‘Megaleion’ – well known throughout Greece, no doubt owing part of its success to the fact that it was also capable of healing wounds and reducing inflammation.

The Greeks made a vital contribution to the future study of plant medicine by classifying and indexing the knowledge they had gained from the Egyptians.

The Roman Contribution

Through the influence of both the Egyptians and the Greeks the Romans began to be more appreciative of perfumes and spices – in fact, the word ‘perfume’ comes from the Latin per fumum, meaning ‘through the smoke’ and refers to the burning of incense. The Bible cites many references to incense, together with the use of plant oils and ointments.

De Materia Medica, a renowned ancient book written by Dioscorides, a Roman who lived in the first century AD, listed in detail the properties of about 500 plants. This information proved to be so influential that the book was translated into several languages, including Persian, Hebrew and Arabic. Dioscorides also told how he had come across the story of the doctor whom tradition claimed had invented distillation. This doctor had apparently cooked some pears between two plates in the oven and when they cooled, had tasted the liquid formed on the underneath of the top plate. To his surprise, this both smelled and tasted of pears, and as a result, he began to try and obtain not only this delicious ‘spirit’ as he called it, but others, in greater quantity. (Unknown to Dioscorides, others had already tried: in 1975 Dr Rovesti, well known for his research with essential oils, found in a museum a terracotta still from the foothills of the Himalayas – now 3,000 years old.)

As the Roman Empire spread, so did the knowledge of the healing properties of plants. When the Roman soldiers went on their long journeys to conquer the world they collected seeds and plants, which ultimately reached Britain, among other countries, and eventually became naturalized. Among these were fennel, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

Baghdad was for many years the chief centre for rose oil from Persia (obtained by solvent extraction), and Damascus boasted a perfume industry.

Incidentally, it is thought that the Arabs were the first to distil ethyl alcohol from fermented sugar, thus providing a second medium which could be used for solvent extraction. (Around the ninth century Ibn Chaldum, an Arabian historian, tells that rose water was exported from Arabia to India and China.

(#litres_trial_promo))

Early Distillation

In AD 980 a man was born who was to be responsible for making a vast improvement to the simple distillation units then known. Born in Persia, Avicenna (translated from the Persian name Ibn Sina) improved the cooling system, making it much more efficient, enabling the vaporized plant molecules and steam to cool down more quickly.

Avicenna further contributed to the world of essential oils by writing The Book of Healing and also The Canon of Medicine, used by many medical schools for centuries, and indeed right up to the middle of the 16th century, at Montpelier in the south of France.

Much more attention was now given to essential oils. Previously they had been regarded mainly as by-products of the much desired floral waters, as mentioned earlier. Other improvements to the distillation process followed (including refinements in the hardware used, due to the development of glass blowing in Greece and Venice) together with many new formulae for ointments and perfumes. One may almost say that the use of essential oils as we know them today began at this time.

During the Holy Wars, the Crusaders would have suffered the same stomach problems Europeans can suffer now in Middle Eastern countries. Without doubt they would have been given the same plant medicines used by the natives, including the floral waters and essential oils. On their way back, they would have stopped at various islands in the Mediterranean, where plant knowledge had been preserved from Roman times. From there they would have brought home with them perfumes and flower waters for their wives, relating stories of the successful Arab medicines. Thus the more advanced use of plants for medicines and perfumes became known once again in Italy and possible for the first time in the rest of Europe.

Development in the Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages the monasteries cultivated aromatic plants, some of which had been brought from Italy, such as thyme and melissa. In the 12th century a German Abbess, St Hildegard of Bingen, was known to have grown lavender for its therapeutic properties, using also its essential oil.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the 14th century, frankincense and pine were burned in the streets, perfumed candles were burned indoors and garlands of aromatic herbs, spices and resins were worn round the neck to try to combat the deadly plague (Black Death), which raged throughout Europe during this time.

At the end of the 15th century (1493) in a town now part of Switzerland, Paracelsus was born, destined to become a famous physician and alchemist. He wrote the Great Surgery Book in 1576 and established that the main role of alchemy (the old name for chemistry) was not to turn base metals into gold but to develop medicines, in particular the extracts from healing plants (which he named the ‘quinta essentia’). He felt that distillation released the most highly desirable part of the plant and mainly because of his ideas, oils of cedarwood, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh, rose, rosemary and sage were well known to pharmacists by the year 1600.

As the gateway to trade with the Arabs was Venice, it was here that perfumed leather for gloves was first known. From here, Catherine de Medici took her perfumer with her to France in 1533. About this time, commercial production of essential oils and perfume compounds began in Grasse (perhaps due to her influence) and the area soon became established as the main perfume producing area, growing such plants as tuberose, acacia, violets, lavender and roses.

During the Renaissance period essential oils were much more widely used (the result of improved methods of distillation and the steady progress of chemistry) and around 1600, essential oils of lavender and juniper were first mentioned in an official pharmacopoeia in Germany.

The first botanical gardens were introduced into Europe before the birth of Christ and were later to be found in many monasteries. Because mainly medicinal plants were grown, botany became part of the study of medicine and under the influence of the Renaissance, universities teaching medicine began to have botanical gardens (known as ‘physic’ gardens). The first one of these was founded in Italy halfway through the 16th century, Britain’s first being established in Oxford in 1621.

Aromatic Waters

Sometime during the 16th century Royal Hungarian Water was produced by distilling alcohol with fresh rosemary blossoms.

A French friend of mine, Claudine Luu, well known in France for her lectures and courses on essential oils (and her products) sourced the original recipe for this. The proportions are not given, but the other plant distillates in it were sage, rose and lavender.

Carmelite water (eau des Carmes) was produced by French Carmelite nuns in 1611 using melissa, which, like orange blossoms and rose petals, produces very little essential oil but yields delightfully aromatic water. Melissa water was popular for centuries and was never synthesized as are rose and orange flower waters nowadays.

Another famous water, which is still very popular, was introduced by a one-time Franciscan monk who left Italy to live in Cologne in 1665. His recipe for ‘Aqua Mirabilis’ (wonderful water) was brought to world fame by his nephew, J. M. Farina, and is known nowadays as ‘Eau de Cologne’. Containing essential oils of bergamot, orange and lemon as well as lavender, rosemary, thyme and neroli (diluted in strong ethyl alcohol) it was used as a health-promoting lotion.

Progress in Britain

In 1653, Nicholas Culpeper wrote his famous herbal, from which people still quote today. Salmon followed with his Dispensatory (a pharmacopoeia) in 1696 and his Herbal (1710). By 1700 essential oils were widely used in mainstream medicine until the science of chemistry allowed the synthesis of materials in the laboratory. Around this time, during and after the Bubonic Plague, doctors were rather bizarre looking figures, walking through the streets wearing hats with large ‘beaks’, in which were placed aromatic herbs, so that the air breathed in passed through them and was rendered antiseptic. They waved in front of them a long cane with a big openwork top, which was also filled with aromatic herbs; this disinfected the air in front of them for double security!

The industrial revolution was in part to blame for the decline of the use of herbs in Britain. As people moved from the country to seek more profitable work in the new industrial towns, they came to live in terraced houses with little or no gardens. This resulted in a decline in the use of fresh herbs for cooking and future generations lost the art of incorporating them in recipes. Other European countries, less affected by the mushrooming of factories, continued to use them in the preparation of meals and also as remedies.

Scientific Development

By 1896 chemical science was becoming increasingly important. It was thought better to isolate the active therapeutic properties from plants and use them alone, or better still, to synthesize them – a much cheaper exercise, enabling large quantities of a uniform standard to be available (not possible with natural extracts alone). The drugs produced have proved to be very powerful and have an important role to play in modern medicine. However, synthetic copies of nature’s healing materials tend to be toxic and do not appear to have the same respect for living human tissues. They tend to produce numerous side effects (some serious) which then need treatment themselves and a vicious circle is begun. Many of the people in hospital nowadays are there not because of their original illness but because of problems caused by the side effects of the drugs taken (iatrogenic disease). The use of natural materials such as herbs and essential oils does not give rise to ever-increasing dosage, as is the case with synthetics, to which germs may often become resistant.

Enter Aromatherapy!

The early years of this century saw a renewal of interest in natural methods of healing, no doubt stimulated by the unfortunate side effects beginning to be shown after long-term use of drugs. A few scientists began seriously to investigate and research the healing properties of essential oils, Rene Maurice Gattefossé being the most well remembered, probably because it was he who coined the word ‘aromatherapy’. He had been introduced to the use of essential oils by Dr Chabenes, another Frenchman, who had written a book in 1838 on the enormous possibilities of utilizing aromatic material. Gattefossé (and others) used essential oils on the wounds of those who suffered in the terrible trench warfare of 1914–1918. In his research he discovered that essential oils take from 30 minutes to 12 hours to be absorbed totally by the body after rubbing on the skin. (This has since been corroborated by other researchers e.g. Schilcher.

(#litres_trial_promo)) Gattefossé’s book Aromathérapie was published first in 1937 and is now available in English.

Other pioneers worthy of note are two Italian doctors, Gatti and Cajola, and later Paolo Rovesti, who researched the psychosomatic effects of essential oils.

The use of essential oils under the name ‘aromatherapy’ reached Britain in the late 1950s, after an Austrian, Marguerite Maury, married to a French doctor and homoeopath, became intensely interested in essential oils, both working with them medically and researching their ability to penetrate the skin and to maintain youth. Aromatherapy was not introduced via the medical profession, but via beauty therapists, qualified in massage techniques, which is why, for so many years, aromatherapy has appeared to be ‘a massage using essential oils’. As beauty therapists are not allowed in their code of ethics to ‘treat’ any medical condition, the main application of aromatherapy in Britain was to relieve stress and skin conditions by massage, and only massage. Partly because of this, and partly because much of the information on essential oils was tied up with their use in perfumes, the aromatic compounds called absolutes and resins were introduced alongside essential oils in treatment blends when aromatherapy with massage first appeared on the scene.

Through her lectures, Mme Maury was able to bring her ideas to beauty therapists in England, where she opened a clinic for facial and skin care treatments.