Youngken • Botany and Medicine 



147 



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 in- 

 fluence played on medical practice 

 since 77 a.d. by the famous "De Ma- 

 teria Medica" of Dioscorides, the 

 Greek physician-botanist. In fact, the 

 descriptions of Dioscorides were often 

 extensively copied in the herbals and 

 medical botanies which followed soon 

 after the event of printing in the early 

 16th century. As the years of the Ren- 

 aissance passed, writers of herbals be- 

 gan to show more originality and im- 

 agination. 



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 her- 

 bals. Folklore and empiricism were, in- 

 deed, 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 Pharma- 

 corum" (1542) and Hieronymus Bock, 

 "De Stirpium" (1552), a greater bo- 

 tanical interest was aroused in medic- 

 inal 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 

 include three parts, was published in 

 1568. John Gerarde published his fa- 

 mous "The Herbal, or General History 

 of Plants" in 1597 and a parade of fa- 

 mous descriptive histories, plantarum, 

 flora and/or catalogues of various kinds 

 of plants became available from then 

 on. 



Fortunately plant taxonomv as a 

 science did not remain long bound by 

 the methods of classification so artifi- 

 cially employed in the botanical works 

 of the 16th and I7th centuries. A 

 keener awareness of plant morphology 

 was obviously stimulated to some de- 

 gree by the use of plants for medical 

 purposes, 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 gener- 

 ated to some extent by the early her- 

 bals and the direct influence of com- 

 parative natural history and phylogenv 

 which soon became dominant, pointed 

 to an urgent need for systematic plant 

 classification according to more scien- 

 tific relationships. These relationships 

 were at first largely structural ones 

 based upon comparative plant anat- 

 omy. Later, in the early 19th century 

 during the Darwinian period, they be- 

 came intensified to include more 

 phylogenetic relationships. Indeed, the 

 beginning of this new interest in com- 

 parative structural and phylogenetic 

 relationships was reflected early in the 

 writings of Nehemiah Grew, "An Idea 

 of a Phytological History" (1673) and 

 "Anatomy of Plants, with an idea of 

 a philosophical Histor}' of Plants" 

 (1682). Soon after, in the 18th cen- 

 tury, 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. 



