Medicinal garden adds green touch: 10/28

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Medicinal garden adds green touch

Instead of paving parking spaces surrounding the James E. Clyburn Research Center, MUSC chose to dig into its archives to create the F. Peyre Porcher Medicinal Garden.

The medicinal garden, which will feature an educational and an online exhibit, is based on the works of F. Peyre Porcher, 19th century alumnus and professor at MUSC, and author of Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests.

During the Civil War, a shortage of manufactured drugs from Europe led the Confederate States of America Surgeon General Samuel Preston Moore to commission fellow Medical College alumnus Porcher to compile a book that would catalog Southern plants with therapeutic qualities that could be used as substitute drugs. More than 40 (of the many hundred) plants listed in Porcher's book will be planted in the garden.

"I'm very excited about the medicinal garden," said MUSC President Ray Greenberg, M.D., Ph.D. "My hope is that it will be a living laboratory that will allow our students to learn about plants that have medicinal use not
from a textbook, but from a part of their natural environment."

Friday, Oct. 28, 2011

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