Clays and Health

Chapter 1 - Background.- Chapter 2 - Definition of clay and clay mineral.- Chapter 3 - Historical aspects of a natural pharmacopeia: Clay in the corpus of "the medieval pharmacopeia" written in Arabic.- Chapter 4 - Description of clay minerals.- Chapter 5 - Reactivity of clay minerals depending upon their structural properties.- Chapter 6 - General information on applications of clay in the fields of health and well-being.- Chapter 7 - Therapies based on clay.- Chapter 8 - Principal modes of clay use.- Chapter 9 - Provisioning, recycling and trade of clay.- Appendix.- Further Reading.- Glossary.- Index.



 

Michel Rautureau began working in 1958 at the French National Centre for Scientific Research's "laboratoire de synthèse atomique et d'optique protonique" a facility dedicated to electron microscopy of clay minerals and cell biology. He worked under the direction of Professor Claude Magnan, author of the famous "Traité de microscopie électronique". Dr. Rautureau received his PhD in 1972; his theses work on the crystalline structure of sepiolite, a fibrous clay mineral, and was soon recognized as an authority on clay minerals. He, with Simonne Caillère and Stéphane Hénin authored "Minéralogie des argiles" a major reference in the subject of the mineralogy of clay minerals and the first book to present their global classification. Dr. Rautureau is a member of Groupe Français des argiles (GFA), Association Internationale Pour L' Étude des Argiles (AIPEA), French society of electron microscopy, French society of Mineralogy, French society of geology, Sociéte botanique de France, Association Française pour l'avancement des Sciences (AFAS), and a member of the administrative council for Section Française de l'Institut International de la Conservation (SFIIC).


M. Celso de Sousa Figueiredo Gomes, is Professor Cathedratico at Univ. d'Aveiro, Portugal. He was Assistant Professor (1961-1967) at the Mineralogical and Geological Museum of the University of Coimbra, Crystallography, Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geology, and was Chief-Geologist of the Geological Survey of Angola from 1968-1974. In 1964 he began his study of Soil and Clay Sciences at the Instituto de Edafologia e Agrobiologia Vegetal of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científica (Madrid), and continued in Aberdeen, Scotland, at the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research. In 1979 he received a PhD in Materials Science from the Leeds University, United Kingdom. He is the author or co-author of over 500 scientific papers and he has organized various National and International Conferences. Dr. Gomes