folk botanicals: why do they matter in 2025?
By Sunny
I recently asked for *a sign* that plant medicine was intended to part of my life path. Two days later, my mom gifted me with my great-great-grandfather’s early 1900s leather-bound traveling medicine kit.
Once an orphan, and later a widow, Dr. T. P. Williams reared four children by himself, all whilst serving his local community of Vermilion County via his apothecary cabinet. In 1919, he moved to New Mexico to broaden his medical horizons and heal his own health issues, which were exacerbated by the Illinois humidity. But he eventually returned to Vermilion County for 9 years before retiring in Florida (a sextagenarian decision that’s still a pattern in my family to this very day).
Back in his day, especially in rural Illinois, medicine sat at the crossroads of herbalism, pharmacy, and emerging allopathic practice. Many country doctors still carried both tinctures and tonics made from plants alongside new synthetic drugs. Throughout his career, doctors had to still rely on some natural remedies because pharmaceutical companies weren’t as centralized, and access to care was often of the DIY and folky sort.
My recent exploration of natural and folk remedy stems from the shocking lack of care I received from our medical system in the wake of my 14-week pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage. My experience, from the moment I tried to call the OB to the moment I left my final appointment (which only occurred due to my own self-advocacy), was shockingly abysmal — far worse than I could have ever expected.
In Dr. T.P. Williams’ time, especially in rural areas, a doctor often was the community healer. He knew your family, he came into your house, and he worked with plant medicines and whatever resources were most closely available. Care was relational, and while it was imperfect, it contained humanity.
Over the last century, the system has stopped seeing people as whole humans, and started seeing us as cases, symptoms, and liability risks (allopathic). First came industrialization,then pharmaceutical monopolies, insurance systems, and the hyper-specialization of medicine. The healer became a technician, medical care became a transactional, and patients became risks to be managed or numbers to chart (often incorrectly, in my experience).
You can see his hand-labeled vials.
By the time I reached the medical system in 2024-2025 as an expectant mother, I (and all other women) entered a setting that has historically minimized, medicalized, and even criminalized women’s pain and reproductive experiences. The system treats the event (or in my case, not even that), but not the person as a dimensional being.
I am not destined to replicate the doctor’s role. Rather, it feels as though I’m inheriting the part of him that moved toward healing in service to community, through the means available to him at the time. And this medicine kit found its way back to me just as I’m leaving one path (I have worked as a psychic medium for the past five years) and stepping fully into plant medicine here in Vermilion County.
I’m slowly studying and working with what’s available to me and what our culture has long forgotten.
It’s the job of a community healer to hold the story of the person, the memory of the land on which stand, and the grief we experience on a cultural scale and continue to pass on from generation to generation.
What today’s medical system boasts in research and advancement, it lacks in care, empathy, and understanding. Without a fundamental element of humanity, the system is doomed to crumble — likely, in this lifetime. The system simply cannot remain as it is, and people are beginning to realize that. In fact, many people are remembering and reaching back through lineage to piecing humanity together again with their hands, their native plants, and their stories.
Plant medicine will not ever fix what happened to you, but it can cause us to heal collectively in the face of our ruptured world.
And that matters.
Mullein tincture making.
