ABSTRACT
Plants have been used by man since the beginning of human culture for a great variety of purposes, including medicine. The earliest known record of a plant being used in medication is found on an Egyptian papyrus dated about 1550 BC. Since then, plants have provided nearly half of the world’s successful drugs, ranging from anticancer drugs from the tiny periwinkle plant, to painkillers from willow bark, and even contraceptives from yams! Plants have provided modern medicine with more diverse and important drugs than any other natural source (Farnsworth and Morris, 1976).
