ABSTRACT
It is interesting how the practice of pharmacy has come full circle, particularly since the days of the medieval European apothecaries. Pharmacy’s first specific and peculiar contribution to the art of healing was the recognition that botanicals contained substances that could prevent or treat disease. American folk medicine and the early colonists relied on the American Indian botanicals to help the ailing. One of the earliest American folk medicine publications is Peter Smith’s Indian Doctor’s Dispensatory, Being Father Smith’s Advice Respecting Diseases and Their Cure (1812). It documented a series of diseases commonly accepted as therapeutic categories of the times and recommended herbs for their remedy. In time, detailed descriptions of plants, flowers, and shrubs were systematically categorized and incorporated as part of the discipline of pharmacognosy.b As the practice of medicine and pharmacy matured from the era of empiricism, the emphasis shifted from handling of the bulk plant to procedures for isolating the crude drug. Eventually, identification and isolation of the active constituents, and structure-activity relationships, defined the modern age of pharmaceutical development. Another driving force for modernization was the recognition that plants and their derivatives were also likely to be poisonous as they were beneficial. Thus, systematic scientific studies of the unseen chemicals contained within the powdered compounds forged the path toward modern pharmacology, toxicology, and therapeutics. Today, botanical remedies are desirable as a way of returning to the holistic art of healing. Thus it has taken over 500 years for Western medicine to complete the “circle” and reacquaint itself with the power that nature always possessed. Ultimately, the goal is,
perhaps, to complement the tremendous advances achieved in Western medicine.
