Origin of Herbal Medicines

                  In herbal medicine, the word herb applies to any plant or plant part used for its medicinal, flavoring, or fragrant properties. Leaves, flowers, stems, roots, seeds, fruit, and bark can all be constituents of herbal medicines. Europeans sometimes use the term phytomedicine, from phyto (Greek for “plant”), to describe herbal or botanical medicine.

Before the 20th century

              Early in human history, people practiced herbal medicine as a magical or religious healing art. From these origins, systems of herbology developed.

                Botanical medicine in the Americas evolved through the blending of two separate traditions. Passengers on the Mayflower carried with them a book on European herbology. In America, the colonists encountered not only new plants but also Native Americans familiar with the properties of these plants. During the 1800s many of the most effective American healers combined European and Native American herbalism. By the 1850s Chinese immigrants had added their own herbal tradition to the mix, especially on the West Coast. Herbology began to lose influence in the United States after the Civil War, partly because conventional medicine improved during the war.

During the 20th century

                By the beginning of the 20th century chemists had become more adept at isolating the active ingredients in plants, and the use of raw, whole-plant materials began to seem crude and unscientific. In 1910 the Carnegie Foundation, at the request of the American Medical Association, issued a study of American medicine called the Flexner Report. This report elevated pharmaceutical medicine and was critical of schools that taught herbal medicine and other nonconventional approaches. This influential report contributed greatly to the decline of alternative medicine, including herbology.

The situation today

                 Modern pharmaceuticals cannot treat every condition effectively, and some drugs have unwanted side effects. In the late 20th century herbal medicine made a comeback as people began to seek alternatives to these drugs. Today more than 1,500 herbal preparations are marketed in the United States, not only in health food stores but also in pharmacies, supermarkets, department stores, and even truck stops.

                 Another indication of the importance of herbals: About one-quarter of all U.S. prescription drugs are derived from herbs. The pharmaceutical industry uses around 120 different compounds derived from plants in the drugs it manufactures, and it discovered nearly three-quarters of these compounds by studying folk remedies. Examples of drugs from plants include quinine, from the bark of the South American cinchona tree, used to treat some strains of malaria; digitalis, a widely prescribed heart medication, derived from the foxglove plant; salicylic acid, the source of aspirin, from willow bark; and taxol, for treating ovarian cancer, from the yew tree.