24 



BOTANY AND MEDICINE 



H. W. Youngken, Jr. 



Obviously, man's first interest in plant life dates back to earliest time when, 

 in order to survive, he soon recognized a need to become familiar with the 

 plants of his environment and to engage in food-crop development. This was 

 long before botany took form as a science. Concomitantly with the earliest 

 need of plants for food there was a keen awareness of the values of many 

 forms of plant life as sources for medicines. Admittedly, the use of plants 

 in early medicine was often cloaked in mystery, and physician-botanists, of 

 which there were many, were frequently better psychologists, philosophers, 

 or in many cases tribal witch doctors, than medical scientists. Nevertheless, 

 the influence of a botanical interest in medicine, or medicine in botany as 

 one might also look at it, was stimulated early and long before both sciences 

 became formalized as we know them today. 



Before dealing with some of the modern concepts of botano-medico relation- 

 ships it is perhaps pertinent that several of the highlights of early materia 

 medica which played an important part in the development of botany as a 

 science be reviewed. Indeed, it was this aspect of medicine, and later phar- 

 macy, in which many of the closest bonds between botany and medicine 

 were first made. In the pages that follow it will be seen that even today much 

 of the influence of botany on modern medicine comes from an interest in 

 certain plants which yield therapeutically useful constituents. The fact is 

 that many of these plants were described as useful crude drugs in the materia 

 medicas of ancient time. 



Undoubtedly the early descriptive materia medica and botany texts of 

 Greek and Roman physician-botanists such as Theophrastus (often called the 

 Father of Botany), Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, 

 Galen, and others had much to do with the beginnings of scientific botany. 

 On the other hand, the botany of the first centuries a.d. could hardly be 

 called a science. 



Students of medical and pharmacy history are well aware of the great 



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