Missouri Botanical 
Garden Bulletin 
Vol. I St. Louis, Mo., August, 1913 No. 8 
THE MEDICINAL GARDEN. 
A medicinal garden, where many of the plants from which 
our drugs are es ae ney be seen growing, is one of the 
- unique features of the Garden. Attention was called in the 
last number of the BuLtetTin to the comparatively little 
known North American tract—a large area devoted to the 
growing of plants indigenous to our continent. The medic- 
inal garden, on account of its rather secluded location and 
small size, is perhaps even less well known than the North 
American tract. Like the latter, however, it is full of interest 
and deserves to become more popular with Garden visitors. 
Here plants from the poison hemlock, a decoction of which 
became the death potion of Socrates, to the white pine, 
whose soothing properties are familiar to all, have been 
assembled in a small area and, for the convenience of visi- 
tors, arranged into groups according to their physiological 
action. 
The use of plants in the treatment of diseases is the oldest 
phase of applied botany. In the early centuries the interest 
in plants centered almost entirely in the medicinal virtues 
which they were cg fam to possess. Theophrastus and 
Aristotle among the Greeks, and Pliny and Dioscorides 
among the Romans, wrote extensive treatises on plants, lay- 
ing emphasis on their reputed medicinal properties. These 
medicinal properties were, however, in most cases, more 
mythical than real. Very early there had sprung up the 
so-called “Doctrine of Signatures,” which supposed that any 
external resemblance in a plant to any organ of the body 
- indicated its usefulness in curing ailments of that particular 
organ. From this doctrine such names as “lungwort,” “liver- 
wort” and many similar ones have come down to us. 
Pharmacology made little or no advance from the time of 
the Romans to comparatively recent times. It continued to 
rest on a mythical rather than a rational basis, In the later 
centuries the doctrine that diseases were curable by drugs 
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