From the ancient pharmacopoeia to the pharmaceutical industry

From the time mankind understood the usefulness of plants for care of his health, he began to gather and use them. When we still lived in harmony with nature, we each had a personal knowledge of medicinal plants.
With our organisation into tribal communities, there came about the figure of the expert plant gatherer, who knew the right moment to gather individual species and the rules that governed their use. With improved conditions of life, the ancient knowledge was integrated into new precepts that enhanced the methods of preparation of natural remedies.

The ancient knowledge constituted the basis of traditional medicine amongst peoples everywhere and, in the most advanced civilisations, was codified in written texts called herbals.
Herbals brought together all the existing information on medicinal plants from the botanic and therapeutic viewpoints. Among the most authoritative were the encyclopaedic herbal written by Dioscorides (1 c. AD), which more or less provided a summary of the plant therapies of the ancient Romans, Greeks, Africans, Egyptians and other peoples.

But two centuries earlier, the study of plants in the West had already created a proper medical science through understanding of the mechanism of immunity to poisons. The widespread criminal use of poison was such that Mithridates, the king of Pontus, wanted to find an effective antidote.
He ordered his physician, Krateus, to look into the matter. He experimented substances on slaves and prisoners, and, in doing so, increased knowledge of the toxicity of substances.
This marked the first step towards the preparation of medicinal products as antidotes. The first compound was known as mithridatum, in honour of the king, but the most famous was theriac (which came to be known in English as treacle), a formulation improved later by Andromachus, the physician to Emperor Nero. This was a compound of dozens of ingredients, mostly vegetal but also animal. One of the components was viper's flesh, which was thought to resist a viper's poison. For many centuries after, theriac was used as a general medicine against such ailments as chronic headache, liver pains and even the plague.

Pharmaceutical extraction

At the start of the nineteenth century the active principles that cause the therapeutic action of medicinal plants began to be identified and isolated. The first natural substance to be isolated in its pure state was morphine in 1805. This was the realisation of the alchemists' dream, that of finding the unknown substance that gave plants their pharmacological value.

The transition to a chemical and pharmaceutical industry dedicated to the extraction of active principles was quickly made, and other substances, for example, caffeine and salicin (which underlies aspirin), were added to the list of natural vegetal substances known today.
In 1853 the intramuscular method of administering drugs was discovered, and this practice opened the way for the use of a soluble preparation very different from the classic herbal tisane.

However, medicinal plants continued to be used, carried along by the momentum of that great cultural body of knowledge, popular experience.

Medicinal preparations made from vegetal origin provide the organism with a complex of substances known as a phytocomplex. Some of the substances are responsible for the pharmacological action itself, others improve absorption and activity of the first group, and yet others prevent side effects from occurring. When a drug is administered it produces two effects: one beneficial, the other noxious. The beneficent effect has to exceed the harmful one but this does not always occur as the effect of the drug depends on the individual taking it.