Body & Mind

Before Medicine Had a Name

From ancient remedies to modern laboratories, the story of medicinal plants begins with a deeply human instinct: to look to the living world for relief.

In a Sumatran forest, an orangutan named Rakus chewed the leaves of a climbing plant and pressed their juice onto a wound on his face. He then covered the injury with the pulp. Observed in 2022, the behaviour offered a glimpse of an animal using a plant with known biological activity. Whether it helped him heal remains uncertain.

The scene evokes a question whose answer reaches far beyond recorded history: how did plants first become medicine?

No one knows who first placed a leaf against an injury or tasted a root in search of relief. The beginnings were probably scattered across countless encounters with the natural world. A preparation seemed to ease discomfort. An effect was remembered. Knowledge passed from one person to another, gradually becoming part of a community’s understanding of its surroundings.

Archaeology offers tantalizing clues. At El Sidrón, a cave in Spain, researchers found traces of poplar in the dental plaque of a Neanderthal with a tooth abscess. Because poplar contains compounds associated with pain relief, the finding suggests possible self-medication. It cannot reveal intention, but it hints at a relationship with plants more complex than nourishment alone.

By the time this knowledge reached the written page, it was already richly developed. Egypt’s Ebers Papyrus, copied around 1550 BCE, recorded preparations for bodily complaints alongside magical formulas. Centuries later, the Greek physician Dioscorides described roughly 500 plants in De materia medica, recording where they grew and how they could be prepared.

As manuscripts travelled, knowledge changed. Scholars in the medieval Islamic world expanded on earlier writings through observation and contact with unfamiliar plants. Across South Asia and China, and within Indigenous communities elsewhere, distinct approaches to healing developed around local landscapes and understandings of the body.

Modern science would eventually reveal why some of these plants could affect us.

Unable to flee insects or other threats, plants produce chemical defences. Some act on biological structures shared by many organisms, including humans. A molecule that helps a plant survive may therefore influence processes inside our own bodies. Its usefulness as medicine depends on understanding both its effects and its risks.

One remarkable discovery began with an ancient instruction.

During research into malaria treatments, Chinese scientist Tu Youyou returned to a fourth-century text describing the preparation of sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua. Its directions for soaking the plant and extracting its juice prompted her to reconsider how her team was preparing it.

AD PLACEMENT

Experiments using lower temperatures helped lead to artemisinin, a compound that became the basis of a major class of antimalarial medicines. In 2015, Tu received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. An old observation had opened a path for modern investigation.

Yet a plant’s history of use is only the beginning of understanding it. Preparation, concentration, and dose matter. A promising laboratory result still needs testing to establish whether a treatment benefits people safely.

The knowledge surrounding plants also deserves care. In the Brazilian Amazon, Ye’kwana communities have worked to record medicinal knowledge for younger generations while retaining control over how it is shared. A species may be new to researchers and familiar to those who have lived beside it for generations.

The first medicinal plant may never be identified. What endures is the practice that made discovery possible: observing closely, remembering carefully, and asking what a leaf, a root, or a piece of bark might hold.