Talk:Henriette Kress

What Value Are These Links?

All very impressive, other than that the numerous links to promote the henriettesherbal website point to antiquated and imaginative reports of traditional herbal remedies that are themselves not referenced or substantiated in any way. Surely Wikipedia exists to increase the sum of human knowledge, not simply repeat old wives tales, witchcraft and the content of complementary therapy 'novels'. Cjsunbird (talk) 22:52, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

OK, I think everyone else is taking the high road and ignoring you, given the date on your note, but I'd like to comment on this. Clearly, Cjsunbird, you are not an herbalist, know little about the topic, and are likely not an historian of any value, if you do not comprehend the usefulness of cataloging and verifying the documents of medicinal practices prior to modern allopathic medicine (most especially those of widespread repute). There are numerous accounts and scientifically verified research results on the efficacy of herbal medicine, and many of those studies (you can find the abstracts to many on sites like PubMed [1] or Phytomedicine [2]) were facilitated to determine the truth behind "old wives tales", as you so graciously put it - you can easily look it up, if you choose to bother doing research without enclosing yourself in a few shortsighted, fallaciously founded references that substantiate your original point of view (namely that herbal manuscripts should be dismissed as completely worthless). Additionally, using the word 'witchcraft' in this context is in itself rather, well, historical and uninformed of you. I do agree that references require substantiation in some form before being accepted as factual data, and that anecdotal data is not the proper content for Wikipedia, but this article specifically is about *Henriette Kress* and her practices, not herbalism in general. Please do the appropriate research on the topics at hand before posting misguided insults - that is highly contrary to the nature of Wikipedia. --Envelopenomia (talk) 17:17, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Herb counts

I'm moving the following material here, which looks like editorial synthesis, a form of original research – where do reliable, independent sources explicitly make the comparison between Kress's herb catalogue and the number of herbs used by Chinese/American/Cherokee herbalists?

For purposes of comparison, a typical Chinese herbalist might use 300 herbs, an American herbalist 50–100 and a native Cherokee medicine man 800.

—Sangdeboeuf (talk) 08:10, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

University of Pittsburgh site

http://www.pitt.edu/~cbw/herb University of Pittsburgh herbal sources.html

This site returns a 404 error message, and a search at archive.org gives the same result. Google wasn't helpful either. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 09:25, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Notability

I added the notability template for biographies to the top of the article – nearly all the sources given except those for trivial biographical information are either self-published primary sources or cited out of context, for instance "The Teaching Garden", which appears to be self-published and lacking significant information about the subject, as is "Howie Brounstein's Homepage", which doesn't show that the subject is "known as cyberspace's Herbal Archivist" by anybody other than the (self-published) author.

The only reliable, independent source I've managed to find that might treat the subject in any depth is this "Review of Henriette's Herbal" from Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet (although it is ostensibly about the website, not Kress herself) The author of "Practical Herbs by Henriette Kress: BOOK REVIEW" calls Kress "well-known" but doesn't provide any supporting details. And the material on Kress from another article, "Herbal database management", appears to have been directly copied from Wikipedia. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 09:26, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Update: I have removed the poorly-sourced and unsourced content from the article. The article still lacks sufficient independent, reliable sources to establish notability, in my opinion. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 12:17, 20 January 2017 (UTC)