Open your kitchen cupboard and what do you see? Salt, pepper, ginger, dill, alum, meat tenderizer, honey, molasses, baking soda; and the list can go on. Viewed as flavor enhancers and condiments these are tasty additions to any meal. But there is a hidden world of medicinal benefit in many of those little tins and shaker-topped jars.

When you reach for the alum to eliminate a canker sore, or swallow a teaspoonful of honey to soothe a sore throat, or make a moist plaster of meat tenderizer to take the sting out of a bee-bite, you are practicing “Kitchen Cupboard Medicine”. Kitchen Cupboard Medicine has been practiced for hundreds of years. In his ancient, surviving text, De Medicina, Aulus Cornelius Celsus’s (ca 25 BC—ca 50) references a pain relieving pill containing pepper.