In Pursuit of Garlic Read Free Page A

parasites, to protect against diarrhea caused by “injurious waters,” to kill lice and nits, and to treat toothaches.
    Perhaps more prophetically, given today’s continuing research into the use of garlic to lower blood pressure and get rid of serum cholesterol, Dioscorides said garlic cleaned out the arteries and “opened the mouths of veins.”
    Or was it Pliny who said that? It’s hard to know for sure, for both recommended garlic for similar ailments, and they were contemporaries. (Pliny died in AD 79, Dioscorides in AD 90.) Pliny’s book was quoted for centuries, and Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica became the main pharmacological work in Europe and the Middle East until the 1600s.
    Garlic continued as a popular remedy for whatever ailed you during medieval times and the Renaissance. But by the twentieth century its good reputation had plummeted, despite the work of Louis Pasteur, who in the nineteenth century had recognized the antibacterial effect of garlic juice. Albert Schweitzer used garlic to treat amoebic dysentery in Africa in the early 1900s, but remedies based on superstition and old wives’ tales were losing favor. By the 1930s, some of the new wonder drugs were already being prescribed.
    Garlic was considered important when there was nothing else around, however. Medical staff on the front lines in the First World War made poultices out of garlic to treat wounds, and it was used in the Second World War when the new sulfa drugs and penicillin were unavailable. And garlic was used extensively to treat tuberculosis in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It’s easy to dismiss garlic as a folk remedy that’s been more efficiently replaced by modern drugs, but here’s something to consider: our ancestors came to similar conclusions about garlic’s medicinal properties while living continents apart and without print or electronic media to instantly broadcast their findings to the world. Afflictions like worms and intestinal parasites, diarrhea and other gastrointestinal disorders, coughs, bronchitis and pneumonia, skin lesions, hemorrhoids, infections of the ears and teeth—all were treated with garlic in some form.
    GARLIC CONTAINS a wealth of sulfur compounds, which are well-known antibacterial agents, but allicin, an oxygenated sulfur, is the central compound most closely associated with garlic’s therapeutic benefits today. (Allicin is also what gives garlic its pungent taste.) Curiously, allicin doesn’t exist in an uncut clove but is born almost instantly when garlic is crushed or cut and two of its elements, alliinase and alliin, are released and rush headlong into each other’s arms. All cooks are aware of this chemical reaction when they chop or crush garlic because they can smell it, even if they don’t know the reason behind it. But this reaction wasn’t understood until 1944, when Chester Cavallito, a researcher at a chemical company in New York City, isolated the compound and named it allicin. He, too, found that allicin had significant antibacterial activity, in some cases almost as effective as penicillin’s.
    In the decades since Cavallito’s findings, research into the medicinal value of garlic has stepped up, even though the garlic remedies we can buy are still homeopathic preparations and health supplements whose content and quality are largely unregulated—in North America, at any rate. But today garlic is being studied for its lowering of blood pressure and serum cholesterol (clearing the mouths of veins!), antifungal activity and antibacterial qualities, lowering of blood sugars, and anticancer effects, as well as for its value as a pesticide.
    Resistance to antibiotics is growing, and garlic could become a welcome alternative. In his richly informative book, Garlic and Other Alliums, State University of New York at Albany chemist Eric Block describes petri-dish tests comparing the effects of dilutions of fresh garlic and the antibiotic ampicillin on an E. coli