Dr Anne Stobart

During my career in adult, further and higher education I gained a postgraduate degree in Women’s Studies at the University of Exeter, beginning a persisting interest in the history of medicine and women healers. I am also trained as a consultant medical herbalist and I joined Middlesex University, London, in 2000, to teach on and manage the degree programme for professional clinical practitioners of herbal medicine. My doctoral thesis formed the basis of Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England which was published in 2016. I was a lead founder in the establishment of the Herbal History Research Network which has promoted scholarly activity and links between herbal practitioners and historians of medicine. I jointly edited the publication Critical Approaches to the History of Western Herbal Medicine: From Classical Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (2014) which brings together a wide range of herbal history research articles and is now available as open access.

After leaving my Middlesex University post in London in 2010, I focused on the Holt Wood Herbs project in Devon, redeveloping a redundant conifer plantation as a woodland source of medicinal plants. Through this project I sought to develop sustainable ways of cultivating and using medicinal trees and shrubs, drawing on past practices and developing new and regenerative approaches using permaculture design principles. A publication arising from this project is fully referenced and is The Medicinal Forest Garden Handbook. Subsequently I have developed the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust website to promote further education and research into designs supporting biodiversity and resilience of medicinal plant supplies. I offer a number of short courses, available online, to promote awareness of the potential of medicinal trees and shrubs. I have also published research articles on historical recipes and the history of herbal medicine, and have a continuing interest in research into agroforestry and permaculture related to herbal medicine.