ABSTRACT
The medicinal use of herbs is as old as mankind itself. The poisonous and bene cial healing properties of plants were discovered by man, through trial and error, in search for food. Scientists from early civilizations (Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Aztec, Greek, and Moslem) enriched our current knowledge in herbal medicine. Their manuscripts are a living proof showing the use of
plants for medicinal purposes. With time, plants became the backbone of the earliest generation of pharmacologically active compounds. Today, despite modern technological advances, a large number of potentially active drugs still originate from plants [1-6].
