148 



LOWER PLANTS, DISEASES, AND MEDICINE 



It was probabl\' at this period wlicn 

 botany as a science shook off much of 

 the medical influence which had domi- 

 nated manv of the 16th and 17th cen- 

 tun- 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, 

 the applied aspects of medical botany 

 such as medicinal plant exploration, 

 identification and crude drug studies 

 gradually were taken over by faculties 

 of pharmacy. 



Great advances were made during 

 the late 19th and early 20th centuries 

 in standardizing the descriptive nomen- 

 clature of botanical drugs. Pharma- 

 cognosy, that area of pharmacy which 

 deals with natural products as phar- 

 maceuticals, had been established as a 

 science by a German medical student 

 at Halle m 1815. For more than 100 

 years this pharmaceutical science in 

 which plant drugs are extensively stud- 

 ied, has been responsible for car^^•ing 

 on medical aspects of botany, particu- 

 larly those aspects that are important 

 in drug standardization, drug plant 

 exploration, and medicinal plant chem- 

 istry'. Using the conventional methods 

 of the anatomist, pharmacognosists 

 soon began amassing extensive histo- 

 logical descriptions of almost every 

 medicinal plant used by mankind. 

 Many of these became reference de- 

 scriptions for standard materia medica 

 and pharmacopeia compendia. So in- 

 tensive was this type of research in 

 pharmacognosy between 1900 and 1940 

 that much less effort was devoted by 

 the pharmacognosist to plant chem- 

 istry and physiolog)'. The science un- 

 fortunately soon became a predomi- 

 nately descriptive science of crude 

 botanical drugs. It has only been dur- 

 ing the past decade that this trend has 

 been somewhat changed whereby 

 greater interest has been shown by sev- 



eral experimental pharmacognosists in 

 plant chemistr\', biochemistry' and 

 physiolog)'. Botanical drugs reached a 

 peak in the numbers that were em- 

 ployed in medicine and pharmacy at 

 the turn of the 20th ccntur}'. At that 

 time the major contents of pharma- 

 copeias and formularies of many na- 

 tions, including the "United States 

 Pharmacopeia," the "British Pharma- 

 copeia," "British Codex" and "Na- 

 tional Formulary" of the American 

 Pharmaceutical Association were the 

 descriptive standards of crude plant 

 drugs and some of their medicinally 

 valuable constituents. 



Beginning with the time of Woh- 

 ler, the distinguished German chemist, 

 early in the 19th century and with the 

 advance in medical pharmacolog}', 

 which began almost one hundred years 

 later under the stimulus of John Jacob 

 Abel, much of the empiricism that had 

 been formerly applied to the drug ac- 

 tion of plants as medicines had given 

 way to rationalism. Today drugs from 

 plants which are to be used in the 

 treatment of disease must have had 

 tried and trusted chemical, pharma- 

 cological and clinical scrutiny. How 

 much more exacting it is for a chemist J 

 and pharmacologist to demonstrate the " 

 properties of a pure and single cnstal- 

 line compound, regardless of its source. 

 Therefore the use of a great number 

 of plant drugs per se in medicine has 

 significantly decreased. On the other 

 hand the "pharmacotherapeutics" of 

 several purified plant constituents (dig- 

 itoxin, cocaine, quinine, caffeine, mor- 

 phine, codeine, reserpine, ergotamine, 

 etc.) has remained important to med- 

 ical science. 



The age of "pharmacotherapeutics" 

 which means the study of the uses of 

 drugs in the treatment of disease has 

 followed the "pure compound line." 

 It is based, wherever possible, upon a 

 correlation of pharmacological action j 

 with pathological physiology or the " 



