444 YOUNGKEN, JR. 



urgent need for systematic plant classification according to more scientific 

 relationships. These relationships were at first largely structural ones, based 

 upon comparative plant anatomy. Later, in the early 18th century during the 

 Darwinian period, they became intensified to include more phylogenetic 

 relationships. Indeed, the beginning of this new interest in comparative struc- 

 tural and phylogenetic relationships was reflected early in the writings of 

 Nehemiah Grew, An Idea oj a Phytological History (1673) and Anatomy of 

 Plants, with an Idea oj a Philosophical History of Plants (1682). Soon after, 

 in the 18th century, came also the great works of Linnaeus and Jussieu, which 

 established many of the fundamentals of plant taxonomy as this phase of 

 botany is known today. 



It was probably at this period that botany as a science shook off much of 

 the medical influence which had dominated many of the 16th- and 17th- 

 century writings. On the other hand, botany continued to be a major subject 

 of medical-school teaching until well into the 20th century. Apart from the 

 general biological or natural-science value of botany in medical education, 

 which was soon relegated by medical schools to fundamental science depart- 

 ments of universities, the applied aspects of medical botany such as medicinal 

 plant exploration, identification, and crude drug studies gradually were taken 

 over by faculties of pharmacy. It may be said that even today the closest 

 bonds between medicine and botany lie in the applied pharmaceutical aspects 

 of botany. 



Great advances were made during the late 19th and early 20th centuries 

 in standardizing the descriptive nomenclature of botanical drugs. Phar- 

 macognosy, that area of pharmacy which deals with natural products as 

 pharmaceuticals, had been established as a science by a German medical 

 student at Halle in 1815. For more than one hundred years this pharmaceuti- 

 cal science in which plant drugs are extensively studied has been responsible 

 for carrying on medical aspects of botany, particularly those aspects that 

 are important in drug standardization, drug plant exploration, and medicinal 

 plant chemistry. Much of the changeover of medical botany to pharmacy 

 was, in fact, due to the importance of drug standardization, the need to set 

 standards in order to combat a vicious practice of adulteration and/or drug 

 substitution which became rampant during the 19th century. Using the con- 

 ventional methods of the anatomist, pharmacognosists soon began amassing 

 extensive histological descriptions of almost every medicinal plant used by 

 mankind. Many of these became reference descriptions for standard materia 

 medica and pharmacopeia compendia. So intensive was this type of research 

 in pharmacognosy between 1900 and 1940 that much less effort was devoted 

 by the pharmacognosist to plant chemistry and physiology. The science un- 

 fortunately soon became a predominantly descriptive science of crude botani- 

 cal drugs. It has only been during the past decade that this trend has been 

 somewhat changed whereby greater interest has been shown by several experi- 



