St John's wort, a panacea?

When my father's GP surgery was ransacked in 1978 during the communal riots in Sri Lanka's sadly beautiful hill capital, Kandy, I went to pick up the pieces and found this bottle with some of the tincture still left. Almost as a reflex, I picked it up and brought it with me when I came to England. Now it occupies a prominent position in my personal library of 3000 rare and old medical volumes as a nostalgic (from the Greek nostos, return home, + algos, pain) object. My father's surgery was first established in the late 1940s, and I have no idea if he …