A History on Herbal Medicine
Our predecessors were very much in tune with nature and would have known which herbs where good for curing or alleviating their illnesses. My hypothesis is that the more ‘animal-like’ the human, the more it would intuitively know the herbs that would be good for recovering health. I watch dogs eat herbs to purge… how do they know which herbs are good for this and which herbs NOT to eat?
Being in tune with nature means we intuitively would know what’s good for us from things that come directly from nature (rather than synthesised). I assume that after moving more and more away from nature, us humans have lost this basic touch with nature, this in-tunity, this intuition. We probably still have some basic ‘knowing’ latent within, but it looks to me that if we keep moving away from a first order of things we will eventually be very lost in the world. It is happening already. This is why we’re damaging it as well, we’ve forgotten we depend on the world.
Our ancestors also had trial and error as a form of finding out which plants worked for which illnesses and they would pass this information on by word of mouth. I very much dou bt they would have used rats in laboratories to study the effects of herbal medicine at the time. It looks like medicinal plants were being used around 60,000 years ago (Paleolithic era). In fact, plants that are being used medicinally today were being used at archeological sites during this era. Perhaps they were using the plants as food?
Maybe the first doctors to appear within the human race were Shamans (here’s an interesting article around the origins of Shamans and shamanism). Shamans use both psychotropic and medicinal plants, this practice (oder than religion itself) dates back to the Neolithic and Paleolithic eras. Because shamanism is a practice that’s very much alive today, we can clearly see how passing the information down the generations via word of mouth has been a potent way for herbal medicine to stand the test of time.
Earliest Plant Medicine Books
There’s evidence of written plant medicine around 5,000 years ago in the form of clay Sumarian tablets. Then, there’s also the 3,500 year old Ayurvedic ‘Vedas’. There’s also the medical classic The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine, is an ancient treatise on health and disease said to have been written by the famous Chinese emperor Huangdi around 2600 BC, although the NCBI adds:
However, Huangdi is a semi-mythical figure, and the book probably dates from later, around 300 BC and may be a compilation of the writings of several authors.
Source
Either way, these are all examples of very old evidence of written herbal medicine which proves to be valuable today.
Recent History
Herbal tradition in recent history has played an important role as well. Greek Hippocrates (renowned worldwide as the father of medicine and born in 460BC, more info here) made an impact and believed in the healing power of mother nature. Hippocrates took a holistic view of illness and how to heal it rather than just looking at the symptoms (there are so many tablets and pills in the past I’ve taken to suppress symptoms without realising there was a more holistic way of looking at disease/health). Holistic medicine treats the whole person as opposed to ONLY the symptom. Hippocrates used a materia medica of around 400 herbs.
Greeks had an extensive knowledge of healing plants. Written work includes: Historia Plantarum by Theophrastus, (more info here) and Pedanius Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica (more info here).
Time goes by and the Catholic Church, well established by now, prefers that Holy men take care of medicine. The Arabic culture had been taking care of adopting into their herbal medicine tradition the holistic methods of the ancient Greeks (by making copies of their textbooks) and the symptomatic methods of Egyptian herbal healing. By combining these with their own herbal medicine knowledge they managed to keep alive the tradition of herbal medicine.
Ayurvedic & Chinese Medicine
Dates back to around 5,000 years ago. Of Indian origin, this medicine also focuses on treating the hole person rather than just the symptoms. At the same time the holistic Chinese medical system was also establishing itself.
Nowadays both these systems are very popular and studied in a lot of herbal medicine courses.
Samuel Thomson and the Eclectics
Samuel Thomson was a self-taught American herbalist and botanist, best known as the founder of the alternative system of medicine known as ‘Thomsonian Medicine’. Thomson was very much influenced by the work of Hippocrates which influenced his approach on herbal medicine.
Appearing as an extension of ‘Thomsonian Medicine’, Eclectic medicine appeared as a branch of American medicine and made use of botanical remedies along with other substances and physical therapy practices. With a scientific approach, eclectics looked into plant monographs (active constituents and chemistry) but stressed the importance of the entirety of the plant rather than its isolated extracts.
Borrowing Plant’s Defense Mechanism
All in all, I’ve learnt that what we do when we use herbs as medicine (wether we’re talking 50,000 years ago or today’s herbs) is borrow plants’ defense mechanisms against microbes, fungi, animals and so on. Plants have been on planet earth a lot longer than humans and they have proven to know how to survive as well as thrive.
The Real Medicine (Non-Duality Method)
I’ve also learnt that the Real Medicine is in the Now moment. This is a little more difficult to explain, since it deals with spirituality. This is truly the Real Medicine, for you can only heal Now, and when you awake as consciousness (rather than believe you are the person) you heal from the dream of the world.
