History of Western Herbalism: From Antiquity to the Modern Revival

A history, not a proof

Western herbalism has a long written history, and that history is worth knowing. It is also easy to misread. A plant being used for centuries tells us what people tried and recorded. It does not tell us the plant works or is safe. For that, see historical use vs clinical evidence. This page follows the main threads and names the places and people the sources name. It covers Europe and its heirs; Native American, African and other plant traditions are separate and are not summarized here.

Greek and Roman writing

The US National Library of Medicine places Classical Greece at about 800 BCE to 200 CE and describes Greek medicine as moving from the divine and mystical toward observation and logical reasoning. [1] The Hippocratic Corpus, with about sixty works, contains treatises that sometimes contradict each other. [1] Hippocrates is generally credited with using observation of the body as a basis for medical knowledge. [1]

For plants, the key text is De materia medica by Dioscorides of Anazarbus, a Greek physician born in the Roman Empire. Written between about 50 and 70 CE, it studied "the preparation, properties, and testing of drugs" and was the central pharmacological work in Europe and the Middle East for sixteen centuries. [1] Galen, born in 129 CE in Pergamos, built on Hippocrates' humors, and his works came to symbolize Greek medicine for scholars in Europe and the Middle East for the next fifteen centuries. [1] More in Dioscorides and the materia medica tradition and Galen and Galenic medicine.

Loss, Arabic manuscripts and recovery

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, most Greek physicians' works were lost to Western Europe. In the 14th and 15th centuries Western Europeans began rediscovering them, partly through Arab repositories of learning in Spain and partly through Byzantine scholars who moved to Italy after Constantinople fell in 1453. [1] Many first relearned Greek medicine through Arabic manuscripts. [1] This is one reason Greek ideas also live on in Unani medicine and in Avicenna and the Canon of Medicine.

Printing and the English herbals

Not long after printing began in the 1450s, Aldus Manutius in Italy printed early editions of Hippocrates, Aristotle, Dioscorides and others. [1] By the mid-16th century, the NLM says, Dioscorides' message that investigation and experimentation were crucial to pharmacology began to emerge, and modern research into medicines began. [1]

In England, a 2024 article in Medical History names William Turner, John Gerard and John Parkinson as the great English herbals. [2] Nicholas Culpeper's 1652 English Physitian was a bestseller, but the same article argues that it borrowed heavily from Parkinson, and that its astrological content diverted attention from the source of its treatment advice. [2] Read Culpeper, Gerard and the English herbal tradition and the Doctrine of Signatures, a historical idea that is not evidence. Monastic plant medicine, including Hildegard of Bingen, is in Hildegard and European monastic medicine, and Paracelsus is in Paracelsus, spagyrics and alchemical medicine.

Professional bodies and the modern revival

In the United Kingdom, a National Association of Medical Herbalists was founded in 1864 and became the National Institute of Medical Herbalists in 1954. [3] The Institute says it has run a register of professional medical herbalists for over 100 years and that its members have completed degree-level qualifications or equivalent. [4] Other bodies grew up too. A school history records the Faculty of Herbal Medicine founded in 1949 and a General Council and Register of Consultant Herbalists founded in 1960. [3] The author of that history says they found no reason for a split from the original association in the 1930s. [3]

North American plant-medicine movements of the 19th century are covered in Eclectic, Physiomedical and Thomsonian medicine. Today the American Herbalists Guild describes itself as a non-profit educational organization promoting clinical herbalism as a viable profession. [5] It is a professional body, not a government regulator. In the United States, state licensing rules for health practitioners vary considerably. [6]

Reading history carefully

Several cautions apply to every old herbal.

• Old texts were often copied, and copying could carry mistakes or borrowed material, as the Culpeper study shows. [2]
• Old systems explained illness by humors, not by what we now know of the body. [1]
• The NHS notes that herbal medicines are not tested in the same way as standard medicines. [7]

Related pages

Continue to the overview of Western herbal traditions, herbal energetics or modern clinical herbalism.