OF MEN AND PLANTS: The Autobiography of the World's Most Famous Plant-Healer

M. Messegue is apparently a successful healer who utilizes dips and douches concocted mainly from wild herbs, and claims to have treated such luminaries as Churchill, Herriot, Admiral Darlan, and even King Farouk. In this part hortatory, part defensive autobiography, there are a few memories of a boyhood in rural France where his father had a considerable local reputation as a plant healer; Messegue, too poor for medical school, derided to carry on his father's work. His treatment of Admiral Darlan's arthritis was an early boost and with Mistinguett's rheumatism it was up and away with pendulum, herbs and simples. Over the years the medical establishment has brought Messegue to court, but grateful patients vouched for Messegue's methods, and the healer has been careful to refuse services for cancer or maladies requiring surgery. Although there are treatments suggested throughout for a wide range of troubles from impotence to water retention, the appendix lists specifics: impetigo is bathed in a solution of great burdock, poppy, plantain and sage; nervous depression is subdued through hawthorn, sage and violet. Of marginal interest to a small group of home pharmacologists but to most Americans, who can't tell a sprig of hawthorn from an eye of newt, it may well be simply spinach.