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Garcia de Orta (or Garcia d'Orta; 1501–1568) was a Portuguese physician, herbalist, and naturalist, who worked primarily in Goa and Bombay in Portuguese India.. A pioneer of tropical medicine, pharmacognosy, and ethnobotany, Garcia used an experimental approach to the identification and the use of herbal medicines, rather than the older approach of received knowledge.
Medicinal plants, also called medicinal herbs, have been discovered and used in traditional medicine practices since prehistoric times. Plants synthesize hundreds of chemical compounds for various functions, including defense and protection against insects , fungi , diseases , and herbivorous mammals .
Archaeological evidence indicates that the use of medicinal plants dates back to the Paleolithic age, approximately 60,000 years ago. Written evidence of herbal remedies dates back over 5,000 years to the Sumerians, who compiled lists of plants. Some ancient cultures wrote about plants and their medical uses in books called herbals.
Herbals were structured by the names of the plants, identifying features, medicinal parts of plant, therapeutic properties, and some included instructions on how to prepare and use them. For medical use of herbals to be effective, a manual was developed. Dioscorides' De material medica was a significant herbal designed for practical purposes. [39]
The first references to pills were found on papyri in ancient Egypt, and contained bread dough, honey, or grease. Medicinal ingredients such as plant powders or spices were mixed in and formed by hand to make little balls, or pills. [2]
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.
Pedanius Dioscorides (Ancient Greek: Πεδάνιος Διοσκουρίδης, Pedánios Dioskourídēs; c. 40–90 AD), "the father of pharmacognosy", was a Greek physician, pharmacologist, botanist, and author of De materia medica (in the original Ancient Greek: Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς, Peri hulēs iatrikēs, both meaning "On Medical Material") , a 5-volume Greek encyclopedic ...
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.