Herbals

With the advent of writing and written records, our understanding of the history of pharmacology becomes more certain. There are several Egyptian papyruses dated around 1500 BC that relate the medicinal virtues of fruits and vegetables. Senna, colocynth, castor oil, and a number of tree resins were all understood and used, as was tannin from plant galls.

This knowledge was passed onto the Assyrians and Babylonians who probably wrote the first herbals. Here there is a record of hellebore, henbane and mandrake (featured in our story), as well as that most potent of drugs, an extract of the opium poppy.

Although Galen of Pergamum (also featured in this story) is generally considered one of the most famous of Roman and Greek physicians, along with Hippocrates of Cos, it was Dioscorides, a physician who treated the Emperor Nero (54 - 68 AD) who has left us the best record of Romans and medicinal plants. Written in Greek, his herbal De Materia Medica contains descriptions and properties of about 500 plants many of which are still recognizable and usable today.

For well over 400 years this herbal was used and copied across Europe and a beautifully illustrated version was once given by the Emperor Flavius Anicius Olybrius to his daughter Juliana Anica in 512 AD. But it was not for another 1,000 years before it was translated into English. John Goodyer made a single fair copy, in English, of all five books in 1655 and his manuscript still survives in a Library in Oxford. The cures they describe for various diseases are essentially those that will alleviate the symptoms of an illness, not go to the heart of the problem, which was not understood. Plants, they say, can cure almost everything.

Modern scientists and physicians looking back at the work of Dioscorides may be permitted a chuckle every once in a while as they read his work. At least seventy-five percent of his 'cures' are little more than flavorings, dilutents, softeners and emollients, but amazingly about 24 of the drugs found in this herbal are still used in European pharmacopoeias.

Herbals, and various accounts of the medicinal properties of plants, were very popular throughout the middle ages and across medieval Europe. But, starting in the 17th century, they were gradually replaced by early pharmacopoeias as medicine became more and more scientific. The Royal College of Physicians issued a pharmacopoeia in 1618 and started the trend towards accurate descriptions of drugs, how they should be prepared and what quality of materials were acceptable. Subsequent editions of this book were published until 1841, when an act of Parliament, the Medicines Act of 1858, led to the production of the British Pharmacopoeia which then became the standard authority.

The death of the herbal broke a 2,000 year tradition. At its essence a herbal was a combination of the medicinal properties of plants along with a rich folk lore relating to plants and their classification. When botany became scientific and split into different disciplines, the medical uses of plants and how to prepare them was lost, forgotten or ignored. Many people, however, continued to rely on remedies based on a grandmother's recipe or that provided by itinerant herbalists. As our story shows, such herbalists often provided comfort and some degree of cure for people to poor to afford 'scientific medicine'.

I have in my collection a 'modern' herbal, published in 1931. This is very definitely a combination of plant lore and the medicinal properties of plants. It attempts to cross the divided between Dioscorides and modern medicine and gives methods for preparing standardized extracts and tinctures which would have surprised Cesky Brezen. Anyone reading this book, however, should be cautioned. The herbal preparations it describes are too potent to be used or experimented with by the inexperienced or the unskilled, and no matter how tempting, the indiscriminate self-doctoring with untested herbs is best avoided.