The history of man's use of plants as medicines dates back over 5,000 years, to the Indian medical system, the Ayurveda, which basically means the 'science of life'. This recorded over 8,000 plant-based remedies. A thousand years later the Assyrians listed over 250 plants with medicinal uses, and the Ancient Sumerians were found to have recorded over 1000 medicinal plants. 6 Drawings have been found of opium poppy capsules from 2500 b.c . which were painted by the Sumerians. 7 Dioscorides produced a five-volume work, De Materia medica describing the preparation of over 1,000 simple drugs.
Every culture has a history of using medicinal plants to cure their ailments.
Traditional societies have a wealth of such knowledge, which they have built up over several thousand years, and passed down through the generations, which is invaluable. People believed that plants were put on this earth by God for human use, and that the shape of the plant was a clue as to what ailment it cured. For example the similarity of walnuts to the human brain led people to believe that it was helpful in treating conditions of the brain. It was soon displaced by the science of hypothesis testing and the experimental approach in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the centuries, scientists have used this knowledge by observing native peoples and listening to folklore, as in the case of William Withering in the late eighteenth century.