ABSTRACT
The use of plants as medicines started many hundreds of years ago but it was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that medicinal plants gained recognition for their role in providing for the health care needs of many people in the world (Ohja 2000; Ticktin et al. 2002). Traditional medicine over the years has played a vital role in providing healing and contributing toward the discovery of most pharmaceutically active substances in plants used in the commercial production of drugs (Principe 1991; Pearce and Puroshothaman 1992; Robbers, Speedie, and Tyler 1996).
