Farmers attending their annual dinner of Fermanagh Grassland Club heard how to keep in good health from the guest speaker, Herbie Follis, a chemist from the county for over 50 years.

Having treated animals and humans over many years, through his chemist shop in Enniskillen, Herbie has taken up promoting homeopathic medicines.

He grew up on the family farm near Derrylin but one of the farms was at Belturbet. He initially wanted to be a pilot after a visit to Portora Royal School by a Group Captain who offered school leavers to join 502 Squadron and offered support to complete their B.Sc degree at Queen’s University, Belfast. However Herbie said his father told him he would be “killed soon enough” and discouraged him from flying. Instead, he studied pharmacy.

He told his farming audience how he suffered from a number of conditons in his early years. He suffered from “growing pains”, having grown eight and a half inches in one year! His eyesight also deteriorated and he suffered from rheumatic fever and also had viral meningitis.

While he didn’t know he was going to be a pharmacist, Herbie would be inquisitive on the family farm when he was a youth. He was tasked with burying animals that had died from natural causes, long before the law changed to outlaw this practice. He would go with a butcher’s knife and look inside the animal’s body to learn about the structure of the organs and possible causes of death. After qualifying, he spent some time in England before returning to Fermanagh to successfully run his practice in Enniskillen.

After running his chemist shop for years on traditional lines, he was converted to homeopathic medicine. Now Herbie will use some simple ingredients, some from plants growing in his own garden to make up fusions to treat people. For example, nettles will cure itches or rashes, even though it also causes stinging or the oils from deadly nightshade for toothache or buttercups for shingles. “You are what you eat,” he said. “If you can eat good healthy fresh food, you will not go wrong.

He went through the long list of vitamins from Vitamin A, through all the Vitamin Bs, as well as Vitamin C, D, E, K and P.

“Homeopathics treat the symptoms, not the disease,” he explained.