NRES 700

Humor From Plants and People Bulletin, Society for Economic Botany, Fall 1999.

Although our modern packaged pills and sweet amber medicinal liquids looked far removed from the bitter extracts of roots and herbal portions of other cultures, many of our medicines originally came from these natural sources. From the earliest times, humans must have searched for any substances that cure diseases and provided relief from pain. Cures were sought by trial and error from what were available in the natural world, plants and animals. Knowledge accumulated thus was orally transferred from generation to generation. Archaeological remains from the New World Tropics indicated that plants might have been used as medicines as early as 8000 B.C.

The first recorded use of plants in medicine was that of a Sumerian drawings of opium from 2500 B.C. However, the first substantial records of plants in medicine was from the Code of Hammurabi which was a series of Babylonian tablets carved around 1770 B.C. The plants mentioned by the tablet included henbane, licorice, and mint which are still used in medicines today. Around 1550 B.C., the Egyptians recorded their medicinal knowledge and disease cures on papyrus and temple walls. Recipes and potions were obtained from plants known to have therapeutic values such as Cannabis, aloe, castor, and mandrake.

Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine emerged during the Golden Age of Greece (circa 460 to 377 B.C.). Hippocrates did not believe that illness was caused by evil spirits and prescribed various good nutrition, purgatives, and botanical drugs for treating ailments. He described between 300 to 400 species of effective medicinal plants. Later, the philosopher Aristotle (384 to 322 B.C.) and his pupil, Theoprastus (372 to 287 B.C.) started the science of botany when they made detailed descriptions of medicinal plants. During the Middle Ages, the spread of medicinal uses of plants were thwarted until the invention of the printing presses whereby circulation of medicinal plant knowledge could spread easily. Until then, monks in monasteries were the only ones with access to the pharmacopoeias. A new desire for knowledge arrived with the Renaissance in the fourteenth century. In addition to his famed paintings, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) was also a keen student of the human anatomy.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the practice of medicine had advanced with that of science and philosophy to the stage of hypothesis testing. Dr. William Withering discovered the use of foxglove extracts for treating heart problems. By the first half of the twentieth century, miracle drugs from plants such as penicillin (fungi); morphine (from poppy); and quinine (from Cinchona) led to new heights in disease treatment. Soon active compounds in many medicines were identified and found to be easily created synthetically. Synthetically created compounds often have the added advantage of not carrying additional associated compounds with adverse effects and can be enhanced by with different compounds that facilitate absorption into the system. Read Access Excellence Website # Medicines that changed the world (required).

Today, there is a renewed interest in screening plants for anti-tumor and anti-HIV activity. Because the random screening of millions of plants species only yield scanty returns, scientists believed that the chances of getting a hit would increase if screening would concentrate on plants already used in traditional medicines. Read # Mark Plotkin's Through the Emerald Door.

If you would like more general information on history of medicine, click on and visit the following optional link: Click on Missouri Botanical Garden's link, William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources.

Explore this fun BBC link for teachers on: Medicine Through Time

UCLA Website:The use of spices as medicines

The story of Taxol (American Society of Pharmacognosy)

Medicine--History