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The use of plants to heal the body, ease pain, change mood, and reach altered states is among the oldest of all human practices, and the evidence for it reaches back beyond the human species itself. In the hardened dental plaque of [[Neanderthal]]s who lived at [[El Sidrón]] in northern Spain roughly fifty thousand years ago, researchers identified microscopic traces of yarrow and chamomile, bitter plants of no nutritional value, whose presence on the teeth of a foraging animal is most simply explained as medicine.<ref name="hardy2012">Hardy K, Buckley S, Collins MJ, Estalrrich A, Brothwell D, Copeland L, et al. Neanderthal medics? Evidence for food, cooking, and medicinal plants entrapped in dental calculus. Naturwissenschaften. 2012;99(8):617-626. PMID: 22806252.</ref> The behavior is older than the species. Many animals self-medicate with plants, eating particular leaves or barks for effects that are not nutritional, a phenomenon called [[zoopharmacognosy]]; the human use of plant medicine descends without a sharp break from that deeper inheritance.<ref name="petrovska2012">Petrovska BB. Historical review of medicinal plants' usage. Pharmacognosy Reviews. 2012;6(11):1-5. PMID: 22654398. PMCID: PMC3358962.</ref> Plant medicine has no inventor and no datable beginning. It is as old as humanity, and in its rudiments older. | |||
Every human society known to ethnography carries a plant medicine: an inherited body of knowledge about which plants in its own place will heal, harm, nourish, intoxicate, or kill. The written record of that knowledge is only about five thousand years old, a thin recent layer over a far longer unwritten practice, and it begins with a [[Sumer]]ian clay tablet that sets down a dozen medicinal recipes drawn from more than two hundred and fifty plants.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> From there it runs forward without a break: through the [[Ebers Papyrus]] of [[ancient Egypt]], the Chinese ''[[Ben Cao]]'' tradition, the [[Ayurveda]] of the Indian subcontinent, the Greek and Roman materia medica, the herbals of the Islamic world and of medieval Europe, and into the pharmacopeias of the present day, where plant medicine has not ended but changed form. Roughly two of every five medicines dispensed at a modern Western pharmacy counter still derive from a plant.<ref name="usda-medbotany">U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Medicinal Botany. Celebrating Wildflowers: Ethnobotany. Available from https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/ethnobotany/medicinal/index.shtml (accessed 21 May 2026).</ref> | |||
This | This category, [[:Category:Plants|Plants]], is one of the wiki's two origin roots. It collects the medicines whose active material is drawn from a plant, a fungus, or another living organism, and which entered human use through tradition rather than through laboratory discovery; the other root, [[:Category:Pharmaceutical|Pharmaceutical]], collects the rest. The sections that follow are an account of plant medicine as a subject, its deep history, its present, and the old idea at its center; the wiki's own structure for filing these medicines is described, briefly, at the end. | ||
== | == The oldest medicine == | ||
The | The antiquity of plant medicine can only be reasoned toward, because the practice is far older than writing and most of its evidence has rotted away. What survives is suggestive and, in places, disputed. At [[Shanidar Cave]] in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq, the Neanderthal burial known as Shanidar IV, excavated in the 1950s and 1960s, was found to hold dense concentrations of plant pollen, including yarrow, cornflower, and groundsel; the excavator [[Ralph Solecki]] read these as flowers laid deliberately with the dead, several of them plants with a medicinal use.<ref name="solecki1975">Solecki RS. Shanidar IV, a Neanderthal flower burial in northern Iraq. Science. 1975;190(4217):880-881.</ref> The flower-burial interpretation has since been contested, with later workers proposing that burrowing rodents could have introduced the pollen. The dental-calculus evidence from [[El Sidrón]] is harder to set aside: yarrow and chamomile are bitter and offer no nourishment, and an animal that selects them is most plausibly selecting them for what they do.<ref name="hardy2012"/> | ||
The evidence grows denser as it nears the present. On the floor of a rock shelter at [[Spirit Cave]] in the Mae Hong Son hills of northwest [[Thailand]], deposited some eleven thousand years ago, archaeologists in the 1960s recovered the seeds and pods of plants the Hoabinhian inhabitants had carried home, among them peppers and gourds.<ref name="gorman1969">Gorman CF. Hoabinhian: a pebble-tool complex with early plant associations in Southeast Asia. Science. 1969;163(3868):671-673. PMID: 17742735.</ref> Some of those plants were food; others would have done other things to the people who used them. The deeper point does not rest on any one site. The practice of healing with plants is very nearly as old as the species, and its earliest form was instinctive and wholly experience-based, a knowledge won by trial and loss across uncounted generations and carried forward by memory long before it was carried by writing.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> | |||
The | |||
== The written traditions == | |||
The first medical documents that survive are, very largely, lists of plants. The oldest known is the [[Sumer]]ian clay tablet already mentioned, roughly five thousand years old, which records twelve recipes for preparing medicines from over two hundred and fifty plants, among them the [[opium poppy]], [[henbane]], and [[mandrake]], all now known to carry potent alkaloids.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> In [[ancient Egypt]] the [[Ebers Papyrus]], written about 1550 BCE, gathered some seven hundred plant medicines and the formulas that used them, including [[aloe]], [[garlic]], [[juniper]], the [[castor oil plant|castor bean]], and [[willow]].<ref name="petrovska2012"/><ref name="usda-medbotany"/> In China the herbal tradition attributed to the legendary emperor [[Shennong]], gathered in the work known as the ''[[Ben Cao]]'', treats three hundred and sixty-five plant medicines, and names plants, among them [[ephedra]], [[ginseng]], [[rhubarb]], and [[cinnamon]], that remain in use today.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> In the Indian subcontinent the medical system of [[Ayurveda]] took shape, its earliest texts conventionally dated to around 2500 BCE; the [[Vedas]] record treatment with plants, and Ayurveda's classical compendia, the [[Charaka Samhita]] and the [[Sushruta Samhita]], rest in large part on plant medicine.<ref name="usda-medbotany"/> | |||
The Greek and Roman world produced the texts that would govern Western medicine for the next fifteen centuries. The writings attributed to [[Hippocrates]] (459 to 370 BCE) describe between three and four hundred medicinal plants, ordered by their action on the body.<ref name="petrovska2012"/><ref name="usda-medbotany"/> [[Theophrastus]] (around 371 to 287 BCE), a pupil of [[Aristotle]] remembered as the father of botany, classified more than five hundred medicinal plants, and observed, among much else, that a person could grow accustomed to a poisonous plant by raising the dose in small steps.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> The central figure is [[Pedanius Dioscorides|Dioscorides]], a physician with the armies of [[Nero]], whose ''[[De Materia Medica]]'', written about 70 CE, described close to a thousand medicines, of which more than six hundred were plants; for each he set down the appearance, the habitat, the manner of gathering and preparation, and the therapeutic use.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> ''De Materia Medica'' remained the standard medical reference across Europe and the Islamic world for roughly fifteen hundred years, an authority unmatched by any other work of plant medicine.<ref name="usda-medbotany"/> [[Galen]] (around 131 to 200 CE), physician and pharmacist, lent his name to the [[galenical]] preparations, the compounded plant medicines that pharmacy would go on making for centuries. | |||
The | The learning of the classical world passed, with the fall of Rome, to the scholars of the [[Islamic Golden Age]], who preserved and enlarged it. [[Avicenna|Ibn Sina]] (980 to 1037), in his ''[[The Canon of Medicine|Canon of Medicine]]'', and the Andalusian botanist [[Ibn al-Baitar]] (1197 to 1248), whose great compendium described more than a thousand plants and medicines, carried the materia medica forward and brought many new plants, a number of them from India, into it.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> Through the European Middle Ages the cultivation of medicinal plants and the making of medicines were kept largely within the monasteries, whose physician-monks tended healing plants in walled gardens; the emperor [[Charlemagne]] (742 to 814) directed, in his ''[[Capitulare de villis]]'', which medicinal plants were to be grown on the crown lands, naming around a hundred of them.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> | ||
The | The long sea voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries remade the European materia medica. The opening of the Americas carried [[cinchona]], [[ipecacuanha]], [[cacao]], [[coca]], [[tobacco]], and many other medicinal plants eastward across the Atlantic; cinchona bark, the source of [[quinine]] and the first effective treatment for [[malaria]], reached Europe in the seventeenth century and spread quickly through it.<ref name="petrovska2012"/><ref name="usda-medbotany"/> The Swiss physician [[Paracelsus]] (1493 to 1541) pressed for medicines prepared by chemical means, and taught the [[doctrine of signatures]], the belief that a plant's outward form was a divine sign of the use intended for it. In 1753 [[Carl Linnaeus]] gave botany, and with it plant medicine, the system of two-word [[binomial nomenclature|binomial names]] it still uses, in place of the older descriptive Latin phrases.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> | ||
== From plant to molecule == | |||
For nearly the whole of its history, plant medicine worked with the whole plant or with simple preparations of it: a tincture, a decoction, a dried and powdered root, a poultice of crushed leaves. The nineteenth century broke that pattern. In 1803 the young German pharmacist's assistant [[Friedrich Sertürner]] isolated a pure crystalline compound from [[opium]] that carried the poppy's narcotic power in concentrated form, and named it morphine, for [[Morpheus]], the god of dreams.<ref name="usda-medbotany"/> [[Morphine]] was the first [[alkaloid]] obtained in pure form from any plant, and its isolation opened an age. Within two decades chemists had drawn [[strychnine]] from [[Strychnos|nux vomica]], [[emetine]] from [[ipecacuanha]], [[caffeine]] from the [[coffee]] bean, [[atropine]] from [[deadly nightshade]], and, in 1820, [[quinine]] from [[cinchona]] bark.<ref name="petrovska2012"/><ref name="usda-medbotany"/> The active principle of a plant could now be separated, weighed, standardized, and given in an exact and repeatable dose. | |||
The same century began turning the inherited folk knowledge of plants into clinical evidence. In 1775 the English physician [[William Withering]], told of a [[Shropshire]] herbal remedy for [[dropsy]], traced its power to the [[foxglove]], Digitalis purpurea; the book he published in 1785, ''[[An Account of the Foxglove]]'', set out his accumulated case histories and founded the modern medical use of the cardiac glycosides [[digoxin]] and [[digitoxin]], which are drawn from the foxglove and prescribed for the failing heart still.<ref name="usda-medbotany"/> The [[willow]], whose bark Dioscorides and many healers after him had given against fever and pain, yielded the compound [[salicin]]; chemists learned to synthesize it and then to soften it, and in 1899 the firm [[Bayer]] brought the modified [[acetylsalicylic acid]] to market as [[aspirin]].<ref name="usda-medbotany"/> | |||
For a time, late in the nineteenth century, it seemed the isolation of pure compounds might make plant medicine itself obsolete, the plant discarded once its molecule was in hand.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> That did not happen, and the reason it did not is the substance of this wiki's two-root structure. Modern pharmacology did not replace plant medicine; it grew out of it, and it has never wholly left it. Roughly forty percent of the medicines behind the modern Western pharmacy counter are derived from plants, and they include a large share of the most-prescribed medicines in use.<ref name="usda-medbotany"/> The opium poppy remains the origin of every [[:Category:Opioids|opioid]] in clinical use; the foxglove still supplies digoxin; [[Artemisia annua|sweet wormwood]], long a plant of Chinese medicine, gave the late twentieth century [[artemisinin]], now central to malaria treatment worldwide.[citation needed] A reader who follows this wiki from [[Opium|opium]] to [[Morphine|morphine]] to [[Heroin|diacetylmorphine]] is traveling a single unbroken lineage, from a plant gathered in a field to a molecule made in a factory. | |||
== Plant medicine now == | |||
The rise of the laboratory did not end plant medicine; for much of the world it remains ordinary medicine. The [[World Health Organization]] reports that a large part of the world's population still depends on traditional medicine, most of it plant-based, for primary health care, and the WHO has published since 1999 a multi-volume set of ''[[WHO Monographs on Selected Medicinal Plants]]'' assessing the evidence for the most widely used medicinal plants.<ref name="who-monographs">World Health Organization. ''WHO Monographs on Selected Medicinal Plants''. Volumes 1 to 4. Geneva: World Health Organization; 1999-2009.</ref> Several countries, Germany and the United Kingdom among them, keep herbal pharmacopeias alongside their conventional ones.<ref name="petrovska2012"/> Regulation is uneven, and the unevenness matters: in the United States the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 placed herbal products outside the [[Food and Drug Administration]]'s medicine-approval system, so that a plant sold as a dietary supplement is held to a far lower standard of evidence, labeling, and manufacturing control than the same plant, or a molecule drawn from it, sold as a medicine.<ref name="usda-medbotany"/> Alongside this, the scientific study of traditional plant medicine, the discipline of [[ethnopharmacology]], continues to carry plants from the field into the clinic, and the early twenty-first century has seen a sustained return of clinical research to the [[:Category:Psychedelics|psychedelic]] plants and the medicines made from them. | |||
== The pharmakon == | |||
The Greek word at the root of [[pharmacology]], of [[pharmacy]], and of this wiki's own name is pharmakon, and it does not mean "medicine." It means medicine and poison at once: a single word for the remedy and for the venom, the cure and the thing that kills. A plant medicine is a pharmakon in exactly that doubled sense. The [[foxglove]] that steadies a failing heart will, in a dose not much larger, stop it; the [[opium poppy]] that closes a wound of pain will, in excess, close off breathing; [[Datura]], a healing plant in many traditions, is also one of the most dependable of plant poisons. There is no class of plants that heals set against a separate class that harms. There is one class, and the line between medicine and poison runs through it, drawn very often by the dose alone, the principle the physician [[Paracelsus]] made the foundation of [[toxicology]]: that every substance is poisonous, and that the dose alone decides.[citation needed] | |||
The poet and ethnobotanist [[Dale Pendell]], whose three-volume ''Pharmako'' trilogy is this wiki's primary literary source for the plant medicines, built his life's work on that doubled word.<ref name="pendell-poeia">Pendell D. ''Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft''. San Francisco: Mercury House; 1995.</ref><ref name="pendell-gnosis">Pendell D. ''Pharmako/Gnosis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path''. San Francisco: Mercury House; 2005.</ref> Pendell wrote of the strong plants as allies, powers with purposes of their own, to be met with attention and care rather than simply consumed, and he called the deliberate, exacting practice of working with them the poison path.<ref name="pendell-poeia"/> He understood medicine and poison not as opposites but as a single thing seen from two sides: | |||
<blockquote>Poison and medicine are samsara and nirvana, forever wedded: the pharmakon.<ref name="pendell-gnosis-p7">Pendell D. ''Pharmako/Gnosis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path''. San Francisco: Mercury House; 2005. p. 7.</ref></blockquote> | |||
It is this understanding, that the plant medicines are not tame, and that the same gift which heals can wound, that places the inebriants, the psychostimulants, and the visionaries in the same account as the gentle healing herbs. They are all pharmaka, and the wiki follows Pendell in treating them so. | |||
== Members indexed == | |||
The plant medicines collected in this category are indexed along the structure of [[Dale Pendell]]'s ''Pharmako'' trilogy, three volumes that between them sort the mind-altering plants by the character of what they do.<ref name="pendell-poeia"/><ref name="pendell-gnosis"/> Each volume is a category in its own right: | |||
* [[:Category:Poeia|Poeia]], the inebriants, the plants of loosening and grounding (from ''Pharmako/Poeia'', 1995). | |||
* [[:Category:Dynamis|Dynamis]], the [[:Category:Psychostimulants|psychostimulants]] and the empathogens, the plants of quickening (from ''Pharmako/Dynamis'', 2002). | |||
* [[:Category:Gnosis|Gnosis]], the visionaries, the plants of vision (from ''Pharmako/Gnosis'', 2005). | |||
Beneath the three volumes sit eleven finer classes. Under Poeia: [[:Category:Euphorica|Euphorica]], [[:Category:Evaesthetica|Evaesthetica]], [[:Category:Existentia|Existentia]], [[:Category:Inebriantia|Inebriantia]], [[:Category:Metaphysica|Metaphysica]], [[:Category:Pacifica|Pacifica]], and [[:Category:Rhapsodica|Rhapsodica]]. Under Dynamis: [[:Category:Empathogenica|Empathogenica]] and [[:Category:Excitantia|Excitantia]]. Under Gnosis: [[:Category:Daimonica|Daimonica]] and [[:Category:Phantastica|Phantastica]]. A plant medicine is indexed under one or more of these classes, and the volume above it is reached through the class. The anchor plants of each class, and the full mapping to the Pendell texts, are set out on the three volume pages. The Pendell axis covers the mind-altering plant medicines, which are the wiki's present focus; the far wider materia medica of non-psychoactive healing herbs is a larger estate that the wiki may index in time. | |||
== Notes on scope == | == Notes on scope == | ||
A medicine reaches this category by a two-part test: its active molecule is a natural product of a living organism, and the medicine entered human use through tradition rather than through scientific discovery. A medicine that fails either part belongs to the [[:Category:Pharmaceutical|Pharmaceutical]] root instead. | |||
The boundary of "plant" here is drawn by pharmacological lineage, not by biological taxonomy. Fungi are not plants, but the medicines that come from them, the [[Psilocybin|psilocybin]] mushrooms, [[ergot]], and the medicinal [[reishi]] and [[lion's mane]], belong to any honest account of plant medicine and are indexed here; so are a few materials of animal origin with a deep ethnobotanical lineage, such as the venom of the toad [[Bufo alvarius]]. What the category holds in common is not a kingdom of life but a kind of history: medicines whose source has been a living thing growing in a place, found and used by the people who shared that place. | |||
Origin is single-valued. Every medicine page carries exactly one origin tag, [[:Category:Plants|Plants]] or [[:Category:Pharmaceutical|Pharmaceutical]]. Class membership is not single-valued: many molecules now manufactured began their use in a plant, and those medicines are indexed under both roots at once. The wiki ranks neither root above the other. Plant medicines are not safer or more natural than pharmaceutical ones, and pharmaceutical medicines are not more real or more rigorous than plant ones; the two roots are two indexes into one material world of substances people use to change what happens in the body. Where a medicine page under this root carries a clinical-evidence claim, that claim is tagged against the three-tier framework of the ''WHO Monographs'': clinically supported, pharmacopeially traditional, or folk-medicine unsupported.<ref name="who-monographs"/> | |||
== About these pages == | == About these pages == | ||
Each plant medicine indexed under this root has its own page, built on the wiki's | Each plant medicine indexed under this root has its own page, built on the wiki's history-first plant-medicine structure: an account, given most of the page's length, of where the plant came from and how people came to use it, with prohibition folded into that history, followed by pharmacology, indications, adverse effects, and interactions. Verbatim passages from the ''Pharmako'' trilogy appear on those pages through the wiki's PendellsCorner component. Pages under this root also carry the wiki's plants skin. | ||
This is one of the wiki's MedCategory overview pages. It carries the [[:Category:MedCategory|MedCategory]] marker | This is one of the wiki's MedCategory overview pages. It carries the [[:Category:MedCategory|MedCategory]] and [[:Category:MedCategoryFull|MedCategoryFull]] marker tags; the second suppresses the member list that MediaWiki would otherwise generate automatically, leaving the curated index above as the one the reader sees. It sits beneath [[:Category:Medicines|Medicines]], and is the root of the plant panel: the three Pendell volume categories sit directly beneath it, and the eleven class categories beneath those. | ||
== References == | == References == | ||
<references/> | <references/> | ||
[[Category:Medicines]] | [[Category:Medicines]] | ||
[[Category:MedCategory]] | [[Category:MedCategory]] | ||
[[Category:MedCategoryFull]] | |||