ABSTRACT
The first medicines known to man were certainly made from locally grown wild plants. The knowledge about the actions of the plants was compiled by trial and error and passed down from generation to generation orally. This kind of traditional medicine, folk medicine, is still very much applied in many developing countries simply because they cannot afford expensive Western medicines. The study of traditional medicines, used in different parts of the world, by modern pharmacological methods is now a respected research area called ethnopharmacology. The indications for many plants used in traditional medicine have been verified by ethnopharmacological studies. For instance, hops have been used for centuries as a mild sedative in Europe, and in 1983 the active compound was identified as 2-methyl-3-buten-2-ol (1).
