BOTANY AND MEDICINE 443 



influence played on medical practice since 77 a.d. by the famous Dc Materia 

 Medica of Dioscorides, the Greek physician-botanist, as this compendium 

 of plant, animal, and mineral drugs became the ''bible" of drug knowledge 

 for more than fourteen centuries. In fact, the descriptions of Dioscorides were 

 often extensively copied in the herbals and medical botanies which followed 

 soon after the advent of printing in the early 16th century. As the years of 

 the renaissance passed, writers of herbals began to show more originality and 

 imagination. From this trend, which was sorely needed, emerged the begin- 

 nings of descriptive plant morphology, and still later plant taxonomy. 



Although at first drawing heavily upon much of the style of Dioscorides, 

 during which the medical virtues of various plants were extolled, more de- 

 scriptive imagination characterized the early German, Italian, and British 

 herbals. Writings were frequently supplemented by various grades of artistic 

 drawings and woodcuts. Folklore and empiricism were, indeed, the only bases 

 upon which these early botano-medico compendia were written. Nevertheless, 

 beginning with the herbals of the German "Fathers of Botany," for example, 

 in the works of Otto Brunfels, Herbarium Vivae Icones and Simplicium Phar- 

 macoruni (1542) and Hieronymus Bock, De Stirpium (1552), a greater 

 botanical interest was aroused in medicinal plants. Undoubtedly the German 

 herbals had much influence on others which soon followed in the 16th, 17th, 

 and 18th centuries. William Turner's Herbal, corrected and enlarged to in- 

 clude three parts, was published in 1568. John Gerarde published his famous 

 The Herbal, or General History of Plants in 1597, and a parade of famous 

 descriptive histories, plantarum, flora, and/or catalogues of various kinds of 

 plants became available from then on. Among other authors of early renown 

 were Caspar and Johann Bauhin, Petrus Borellus, Andreas Caesalpinus, 

 Valerius Cordus, Nehemiah Grew, Adam Lonicerus, Petrus Matthiolus, John 

 Parkinson, and John Ray. There were many more. All in some measure 

 copied the general format of the herbals which preceded them. 



In modern times we commonly refer to several of the botanical remedies 

 so extensively described in these more ancient printed herbals as the crude 

 drugs of domestic medicine. Many are still employed much as they were 

 centuries ago as the agents of the homeopathic physician; whereas the isolated 

 and purified active principles or refined extracts of others still serve the 

 medical doctor in the present age of chemo-therapeutic drugs. 



Fortunately plant taxonomy as a science did not remain long bound by the 

 methods of classification so artifically employed in the botanical works of 

 the 16th and 17th centuries. A keener awareness of plant morphology was 

 obviously stimulated to some degree by the use of plants for medical pur- 

 poses, as it was also stimulated by the knowledge of the plants of the time. 

 The result of a greater interest in plant morphology, which was generated 

 to some extent by the early herbals and the direct influence of comparative 

 natural history and phylogeny which soon became dominant, pointed to an 



