From herbs to opium, humankind has used plants to treat illnesses since long before the advent of modern medicine. Today we continue to benefit from and struggle with the properties these plants possess, but it took centuries of experimentation to discover their true nature and pave the way for breakthroughs that have saved countless lives.
A Growing Science
The use of plants in medicine began thousands of years ago, through trial and error, as people explored the different uses of the plants around them, including for food and also in ritual. Only much later – as exemplified in this illustration from Gerard’s Herbal of 1636 - were plants studied more systematically – and, eventually scientifically – for their medicinal properties. This exhibit – and its companion exhibit, The People and Plants Shaping Modern Medicine – explores how the beginnings of medicine and modern plant science were intertwined, and how new discoveries of the plants used in medicine are still important in all of our lives.
Toothwort and Pomegranate (1588) by Giambattista della PortaOak Spring Garden Foundation
We begin with Giovanbattista della Porta, a highly educated Italian nobleman from the mid-sixteenth century. Della Porta was an important figure in the beginnings of the Renaissance. He founded the first scientific society – the Academia Secretorum Naturae – and made important advances in philosophy, literature and science. In his pursuit of knowledge, he, like Galileo, was a leading thinker of his day. Also like Galileo, his scientific curiosity brought him to the attention of the Church and the Inquisition, a problem that plagued him repeatedly over the course of his career. Phytognomica, one of della Porta’s botanical works, is a paradoxical mix of his more modern thinking but also combined with his continued adherence to aspects of medieval folklore, including, for example, the “doctrine of signatures.”
The “doctrine of signatures” refers to the idea that the physical appearance of a plant is a sign – a “signature” – of its utility in treating human ailments. Toothwort, for example, was believed to be effective in treating
toothache. In this illustration, della Porta highlights the physical similarities between the pomegrante and human teeth, which he also compares with a pine cone. Under the
doctrine of signatures, all of these plants were thought to be valuable in treating tooth-related problems.
Toothwort (1737/1739) by Elizabeth BlackwellOak Spring Garden Foundation
Elizabeth Blackwell, working two hundred years after della Porta, in the mid-eighteenth century, provides a fundamentally different description of toothwort’s medicinal properties. In her popular and influential work – A Curious Herbal, the first herbal to ever to be written and illustrated entirely by a woman – Blackwell provided an exhaustive catalogue of British plants and their medicinal uses. Blackwell emphasizes the “calming properties” of toothwort, rather than any specific relation to teeth, referring instead to its value as a treatment for sleeplessness and epilepsy. By the time of Elizabeth Blackwell, thinking about the medicinal uses of plants had already advanced substantially beyond the “doctrine of signatures.”
Title Page (1682) by Georg Wolfgang WedelOak Spring Garden Foundation
While the medicinal uses of toothwort are embedded in northern European herbal traditions, the uses of opium - derived from the opium poppy - have a long history that begins in western Asia, the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean. The beneficial effects of opium-based or opium-like drugs, such as morphine, have been enormous, but unfortunately so have the negative and narcotic impacts – from the opium wars of the early nineteenth century to the contemporary opioid crisis.
Dating from 1682, this image is the cover of Opiologia by the German physician Georg Wolfgang Wedel, a massive treatise on the opium poppy. Wedel was an iatrochemist, an early form of pharmacology that sought to understand how chemical compounds impacted human behavior. Wedel’s research, and the massive volume he published, corresponded with the increasing presence of opium in European medical treatments. Wedel noted its potential for providing beneficial treatments, but also its lethal characteristics. He says, “Opium is a life-anchor for him who uses it properly and with circumspection, but in the hands of the unskilled it is a semblance of Charon’s boat, and pernicious as a sword in the hands of a madman.”
Opium Poppy (1820) by French SchoolOak Spring Garden Foundation
Made by an unnamed French artist around 1820 this painting portrays the detailed structure of the opium poppy seed head. For centuries opium, especially in the form of its derivative laudanum, had been used widely in Europe for treating all kinds of illnesses. But in the early nineteenth century British smuggling of opium into China from India had disastrous social consequences. And when the Chinese Imperial government attempted to crack down on the opium trade, European powers retaliated. The Opium Wars, as they became known, opened up China to European imperial and trade interests – a turning point that many historians view as the beginning of modern China. The opium that was at the center of these nineteenth century international conflicts is harvested from the seed heads of the poppy, as emphasized in this cutaway illustration.
Cannabis (1583) by Rembert DodoensOak Spring Garden Foundation
We now turn to another species with potent chemical and narcotic properties: cannabis, a plant with a history just as long and complex as that of opium. Originating in central Asia, cannabis was bred by people into two forms, one for the production of useful fibers, and the other for its narcotic properties. Already by the 1500s the production and use of the cannabis plant was well established in Europe. This page, from Rembert Dodoens’s influential herbal, Stirpium Historiæ Pemptades Sex, provides two illustrations of Cannabis and goes on to describe the then-current medicinal uses for the cannabis plant, which included as a treatment for sleeplessness.
Hempe (1636) by John GerardOak Spring Garden Foundation
Dodoens’ work published in Latin was influential throughout Europe and became a key reference for information about the uses of plants of all kinds. But only about 60 years after its publication, the English botanist John Gerard completed a new English translation, sometimes using almost identical illustrations. Gerard used Dodoens’ work as his starting point, but also included information synthesized from other well-known botanists such as Mattioli, Bock, L’Obel and Fuchs. Gerard’s eventual publication of the work as his own was controversial, but the impact of his new herbal was profound and quickly became a significant addition to botanical knowledge of his day.
In his herbal, Gerard describes a variety of uses for “hempe”, including one seemingly no longer in use, saying, “the feed given to the hens causeth them to lay eggs more plentifully.”
The Female Hemp (1737/1739) by Elizabeth BlackwellOak Spring Garden Foundation
The use of hemp seed was often emphasized in early medicinal texts, including in A Curious Herbal, from the mid-eighteenth century. Here, Elizabeth Blackwell refers specifically to the importance of growing the female hemp plant. Cannabis is a species that has separate male and female individuals, and for the medicinal purposes Blackwell describes, seeds are essential, requiring female rather than male hemp plants. Boiled in milk, Blackwell recommends hemp seed as a treatment for coughs and jaundice.
Aloe (1583) by Rembert DodoensOak Spring Garden Foundation
Almost from the very beginning of human history, the deliberate movement of useful plants from place to place, including plants used in medicine, has been a normal part of the interaction between people and plants. In the early modern era such movements and plant exchanges, including from one continent to another, accelerated with maritime trade and European colonial expansion. In this page from Rembert Dodoens’ Stirpium historæ pemptades Sex we see him compare “Aloe” with “Aloe ex America.” The plant on the right – “Aloe ex America” – in fact is probably agave, a plant from the deserts of the New World that is superficially very similar to the true aloe (Aloe vera). The true Aloe is from the Old World, and has been used for centuries for its soothing properties. Here, Dodoens emphasizes the plant’s North African and Middle Eastern origin, describing its native habitat and some of its medicinal properties.
The Common Aloe (1737/1739) by Elizabeth BlackwellOak Spring Garden Foundation
Aloe also provides a good example of the changing medicinal uses of plants over time. In A Curious Herbal, Blackwell describes Aloe as useful for “purging,” a use far removed from the familiar aloe-derived creams and gels that we use today. Blackwell describes Aloe as growing in “Spain, Italy, and the West Indes,” perhaps reflecting increased cultivation, but perhaps also, like Dodoens, confusion with similar plants from the New World.
Frontspiece (1785) by William WitheringOak Spring Garden Foundation
We end with the foxglove, a plant forever associated with the late eighteenth century English physician William Withering. The use of foxglove in medicinal treatments began well before William Withering – Elizabeth Blackwell had recorded the plant as an emetic over four decades earlier, and it had been used in folk treatments for centuries before that. But Withering’s work, An Account of the Foxglove, and Some of Its Medical Uses, was the first comprehensive and thorough examination of the plant as it related to medicine.
Specifically, Withering examined the utility of extracts from foxglove leaves to treat dropsy, another term for edema, the bodily swelling that often precedes heart failure. Its emetic properties, when used in the right amounts, could be life-saving. But Withering’s careful analysis also notes that at very high doses foxglove extract can also be fatal. The kind of carefully reasoned and systematic examination of a plant’s medical uses seen in William Withering’s work marks the beginning of the transition from an archaic understanding of plants to the many discoveries of plant-based drugs that have characterized modern science, which we examine in more detail in – The People and Plants Shaping Modern Medicine.
All images are the property of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. All text was provided by staff, interns, and volunteers of Oak Spring Garden LLC, who also curated the exhibit.
Learn more at www.OSGF.org
