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Herbs that typically grew in the wild were accessible to the local population therefore, herbalism was a field not only dominated by scholars. Not only did Herbalists find the use of wild-grown herbs, but they also found the use of natural herbs that acted as drugs for major surgeries or for psychoactive use.
Herbs were seen by the monks and nuns as one of God’s creations for the natural aid that contributed to the spiritual healing of the sick individual. An herbal textual tradition also developed in the medieval monasteries. [15] Older herbal Latin texts were translated and also expanded in the monasteries.
In China and the Arab world, the Greco-Roman work on medicinal plants was preserved and extended. In Europe, the Renaissance of the 14th–17th centuries heralded a scientific revival during which botany gradually emerged from natural history as an independent science, distinct from medicine and agriculture.
In Europe, apothecaries stocked herbal ingredients as traditional medicines. In the Latin names for plants created by Linnaeus , the word officinalis indicates that a plant was used in this way. For example, the marsh mallow has the classification Althaea officinalis , as it was traditionally used as an emollient to soothe ulcers . [ 2 ]
Examples of herbs that may have long-term adverse effects include ginseng, the endangered herb goldenseal, milk thistle, senna, aloe vera juice, buckthorn bark and berry, cascara sagrada bark, saw palmetto, valerian, kava (which is banned in the European Union), St. John's wort, khat, betel nut, the restricted herb ephedra, and guarana.
The work is dedicated to "the perfect knowledge and understanding of all kinds of herbs and their gracious virtues" [notes 11] and incorporates a number of novelties: a register of chapters in Latin and English, an anatomical diagram showing the names of different human bones, a section devoted to 25 treatments presented as "innovative" or a ...
The use of plants for medicinal purposes, and their descriptions, dates back two to three thousand years. [10] [11] The word herbal is derived from the mediaeval Latin liber herbalis ("book of herbs"): [2] it is sometimes used in contrast to the word florilegium, which is a treatise on flowers [12] with emphasis on their beauty and enjoyment rather than the herbal emphasis on their utility. [13]
Theophrastus's Enquiry into Plants or Historia Plantarum (Ancient Greek: Περὶ φυτῶν ἱστορία, Peri phyton historia) was, along with his mentor Aristotle's History of Animals, Pliny the Elder's Natural History and Dioscorides's De materia medica, one of the most important books of natural history written in ancient times, and like them it was influential in the Renaissance.