Category:Plants

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 Neanderthals 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.^[1] 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.^[2] 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 Sumerian clay tablet that sets down a dozen medicinal recipes drawn from more than two hundred and fifty plants.^[2] 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.^[3]

This category, 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, 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 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.^[4] 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.^[1]

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.^[5] 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.^[2]

The first medical documents that survive are, very largely, lists of plants. The oldest known is the Sumerian 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.^[2] 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 bean, and willow.^[2][3] 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.^[2] 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.^[3]

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.^[2][3] 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.^[2] The central figure is 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.^[2] 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.^[3] 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 learning of the classical world passed, with the fall of Rome, to the scholars of the Islamic Golden Age, who preserved and enlarged it. Ibn Sina (980 to 1037), in his 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.^[2] 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.^[2]

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.^[2][3] 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 names it still uses, in place of the older descriptive Latin phrases.^[2]

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.^[3] 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 nux vomica, emetine from ipecacuanha, caffeine from the coffee bean, atropine from deadly nightshade, and, in 1820, quinine from cinchona bark.^[2][3] 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.^[3] 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.^[3]

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.^[2] 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.^[3] The opium poppy remains the origin of every opioid in clinical use; the foxglove still supplies digoxin; 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 to morphine to diacetylmorphine is traveling a single unbroken lineage, from a plant gathered in a field to a molecule made in a factory.

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.^[6] Several countries, Germany and the United Kingdom among them, keep herbal pharmacopeias alongside their conventional ones.^[2] 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.^[3] 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 psychedelic plants and the medicines made from them.

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.^[7][8] 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.^[7] He understood medicine and poison not as opposites but as a single thing seen from two sides:

Poison and medicine are samsara and nirvana, forever wedded: the pharmakon.^[9]

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.

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.^[7][8] Each volume is a category in its own right:

• Poeia, the inebriants, the plants of loosening and grounding (from Pharmako/Poeia, 1995).
• Dynamis, the psychostimulants and the empathogens, the plants of quickening (from Pharmako/Dynamis, 2002).
• Gnosis, the visionaries, the plants of vision (from Pharmako/Gnosis, 2005).

Beneath the three volumes sit eleven finer classes. Under Poeia: Euphorica, Evaesthetica, Existentia, Inebriantia, Metaphysica, Pacifica, and Rhapsodica. Under Dynamis: Empathogenica and Excitantia. Under Gnosis: Daimonica and 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.

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 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 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, Plants or 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.^[6]

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 MedCategory and 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 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.