Page 5 - Medicinal Plants_PharmD general

B.C.). Also, Indian knowledge of medicinal plants is very old dating back
to (3500–1500 B.C.) and gave rise to Ayurveda which is a healthy life style
system that people in India have practiced for more than 5,000 years.
Ayurveda emphasizes good health, prevention and treatment of illness
through lifestyle practices and the use of herbal remedies. The use of
medicinal plants was also famous in ancient China, Greece and Rome. Sun
Simiao was a Chinese physician who was known as the "King of Medicine"
(yaowang; referring to herb medicines, yao). He wrote two 30-volume
works on medical practice that established his place as a central figure in
the field of herbal medicine. Dioscorides was a greek soldier in the Roman
army which gave him the chance to travel extensively to study the features,
distribution, and medicinal properties of many plants and minerals. He
wrote De materia medica, a five volume pharmacopoeia of medicinal
plants and the medicines that can be obtained from them. He was considred
to be a master herbalist and the father of pharmacy. During the following
years, many folk medicine books emerged that described plants and their
folk uses without specific knoweldge of their active constituents such as
the writings by Ibn Sina, Ibn Al Baitar and Dawood Al Antaki.

The place of plants in medicine was radically altered in the 19th
century by the simultaneous application of disciplines such as
phytochemistry, analytical chemistry, biosynthesis and pharmacology. The
substances from the plants were isolated, their structures elucidated and
pharmacological active constituents studied. This development was mainly
influenced by several events such as:

1. Isolation of salicylic acid from willow tree bark which was eventually
used to synthesize acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) (Figure 1).
The ancient Egyptians used willow bark as a remedy for aches and
pains. Also, The use of willow bark dates to the time of Hippocrates

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