Aromatherapie: Les Huiles Essentielles, Hormones Vegetales

Rene Maurice Gattefosse was a French chemist, and Aromatherapie, published by Girardot et Cie in 1937, is his own book coining the term aromatherapie and presenting his case for the therapeutic use of essential oils, including his own account of treating a laboratory burn with lavender oil around 1910 as the origin of his interest. As the primary text that introduced the term and the practitioner's own foundational statement of the practice, it documents a real and lasting strand of modern alternative healing in the words of the person who actually coined it. Its limit is that it is Gattefosse's own case based argument for a practice he was personally promoting, drawing on his own reported case studies rather than controlled clinical trials, so a claim about essential oils' actual physiological effects needs modern clinical research rather than this founding but non experimental text.