Health

Part 1 - Plant Medicine

Author's note. This book is one of a series originally published as Who the Hell are We? but extensively revised and updated.

Thank you for reading, voting, following and adding, 'HEALTH' to your reading list or library. Dunc MacPhun 2022 March 25.

In chronological order, the series contains:-

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/234080674-supernovae-and-life

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/238813918-we-eukaryotes

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/244084318-neolithic

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/247058691-our-sea

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/249120741-migration

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/251168052-middle-era

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/254532133-health

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/256201647-atoms-light

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/257785133-steam

I will be publishing more work in this series.

Thanks for reading. Dunc MacPhun. 2021 February 19 

Large amounts of pollen from eight plant species, found at a 60,000 year old Neanderthal burial site, in northern Iraq, and a mushroom, found with the body of a man frozen in the Ötztal Alps for more than 5000 years, (probably for use against whip-worm) suggested that Paleolithic peoples knew about herbal medicine.

About 2000 BCE, the Mesopotamians marked hundreds of names of medicinal plants, including opium and myrrh, on clay tablets. Papyrus records from Egypt, from about 1550 BCE, describe more than 850 plant medicines such as aloe, cannabis, castor bean, garlic and mandrake.

In India, more than 3000 years ago, Ayurvedic records documented hundreds of pharmacologically active herbs and spices, such as turmeric, while the Chinese recorded plant medicines such as chaulmoogra (for leprosy), ephedra and hemp.

Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus wrote the first botany text, in the fourth century BCE and, about 60 CE, the Greek physician, Dioscorides described more than 1000 recipes using over 600 medicinal plants in De Materia Medica, a book that became the basis of pharmacopoeias for the next 1500 years.

Islamic scholars in Baghdad and Spain preserved much Greek knowledge (including Dioscorides' work) by translating texts into Arabic.   Abulcasis (936–1013) of Cordoba, Spain, wrote The Book of Simples, and Ibn al-Baitar (1197–1248) recorded hundreds of medicinal herbs such as aconitum, nux vomica, and tamarind. Avicenna included many medicinal plants in his 1025 CE book, The Canon of Medicine.

Throughout Europe, Benedictine monks maintaining herb gardens and preserved medical knowledge by translating Arab, Greek and Latin texts obtained from Islamic Spain.

In Britain, in 1526, John Gerard wrote The General History of Plants and Nicholas Culpeper published the Complete Herbal in 1653 listing, anemone for infections, burdock for tooth pain, cottonweed to kill lice and dittany to induce labour.   Fleabane smoke could kill gnats and fleas but it could be dangerous to pregnant women. Hellebore, mixed with food, poisoned rodents.

The Merk company was founded in 1668 when Friedrich Jacob Merck purchased an apothecary drug store in Darmstadt, Germany.

Medicinal herbs transported from the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries, included cocoa, coffee, tobacco and coca. In Mexico, the 16th century Badianus Manuscript described many Central American medicinal plants.

In 1817, quinine was extracted from the cinchona tree for the treatment of malaria but drug resistance gradually increased and a new drug was urgently needed.  In 1972, Youyou Tu (or Tú Yōuyōu), a Chinese pharmaceutical chemist, after screening more than 2,000 recipes and making 380 herbal extracts, from about 200 herbs found in ancient Chinese medical classics, discovered sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) was the most effective. She extracted the drugs artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin for the treatment of malaria thereby saving millions of lives in tropical areas.

The synthesis of drugs, first discovered in medicinal plants, began with salicylic acid (ASA, aspirin), from the bark of willow trees, in 1853, about the same time as digoxin, quinine, and opium. In the 1880s, German dye manufacturers discovered how to purify organic compounds from tar and in the process founded organic chemical synthesis. 

Drug researcher used these techniques to identify hundreds of useful compounds including atropine (from the Deadly nightshade), caffeine, cocaine, ephedrine, nicotine, vincamine, galantamin (from Daffodils) used to treat Alzheimer's disease and morphine and codeine from the Opium poppy.   Digoxin and digitoxin, obtained from Foxglove and Lily of the Valley, were used to treat heart conditions long before the glycoside was identified.