History of Herbs :: Age of Exploration

"New World, New Spices"

In the 15th century, two revolutionary events had a profound impact on herbal pharmacology. Gutenburg invented the printing press in 1450 CE, which allowed for the mass production of books. Even though the lower classes were illiterate, the publication of Herbarius Moguntinae Impressus in 1484 was groundbreaking in that it provided drawings of live plants that were available in nature or in pharmacies. The second even was Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas. On his return, his ships were laden with cayenne pepper and allspice, both of which went directly to physicians who analyzed them to determine their healing properties. It should be no surprise that Christopher Columbus hailed from Genoa, Italy, a city once enriched by the spice trade that was now desperate for new avenues of import.

During the 16th century, the Portuguese and Dutch dominated early exploration. In 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of south Africa and reached India and Indonesia, then known as the Spice Islands. While the Portuguese and Dutch monopolized the sailing routes and imported cinnamon, tea, cloves, and black pepper, the Spanish looked to the New World for riches.

Hernando Cortez landed in Central America in 1519 and discovered the stimulating effects of chocolatl (chocolate), an herbal beverage common among the people already living there. When Cortez returned to Spain, he brought corn, tobacco, lima beans, tomatoes, sarsaparilla, passionflower, chocolate, and cinchona. Tobacco was unknown in the Old World, but it soon became fashionable to smoke it and take it as snuff. Chocolate became a favorite drink among Spanish nobility, who kept it secret for many years, but its taste was much more bitter than the refined semi-sweet chocolate we are accustomed to today. Cinchona was discovered to be the first effective treatment for swamp fever, or malaria, which had beleaguered the Mediterranean region and Europe since ancient times. This use of cinchona was validated centuries later when it became the source of quinine, an antimalarial drug. The revelation of Spain’s secret new herbs came in 1577 CE when a book by Spanish physician Nicolas Manardes was printed in English under the title Joyful Newes out of the Newe Worlde.

In 1599, Dutch merchants tripled the price of black pepper. The English who, until now, had been content to allow the Dutch to take the risks involved with such a dangerous sea voyage became outraged at the price hike. London merchants banded together to form the British East India Company and began importing teas, herbs, and spices directly from India and eventually colonized the region, making it part of the British Empire. Ironically, it was the tax imposed on tea by the East India Company that would become one of the rallying cries for independence heard in the American colonies centuries later.

While explorers were colonizing new lands and returning with new spices and plants, physicians and herbalists in the Old World were left to decipher the medicinal properties of these new plants. The botanical aspects of plants came to the forefront; illustrations drawn from live plants began to accompany medicinal accounts. Quite a few illustrated herbals were printed in quick succession in the first half of the 16th century. Herbarum Vivae Eicones (1530) by Otto Bruhfels describes the plants of the Strasburg region, Neu Kreuter Buch (1539) by Tragus describes all manner of plant, from tree to shrub according to their shape and in De Historia Stirpium (1542) author Fuchsius arranged the illustrations alphabetically by their Greek names.

What caused all of this interesting in the appearance of plants was the Doctrine of Signatures. Promoted around the turn of the 15th century by Giambatista della Porta, a mathematician living in Naples, the Doctrine of Signatures held that the physical appearance of plants revealed their medicinal uses. In Paracelsus, the Doctrine found its most flamboyant proponent. The son of an alchemist/physician, Phillippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim was born in 1493 and took the name Paracelsus based on his personal belief that he was a greater physician than the Roman doctor Celsus, who died in 7 CE. Paracelsus accepted a teaching position at the University of Basel in Switzerland, where the ancient Humoral Theory and the practices of Galen were still taught.

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See our Featured Article An Introduction to the Doctrine of Signatures for a closer look at the Doctrine from Tamarra S. James.

Paracelsus rebelled against the status quo. He rejected the expensive foreign drugs and set out to rediscover German folk medicine. During a stay in Strasburg, he compiled his Herbarius in which he expostulated that each land had its own illnesses, its own doctors and grew a bounty of unique medicinal plants. He chose to write his book in his native language rather than Latin, making its contents available to a wider class of people. In rejecting galencials, Paracelsus was railing against 1,000 years of accepted medical practice; he burned the books of Hippocrates, Avincenna, Galen, and Celsus to publicly illustrate his rejection.

The Doctrine of Signatures that Paracelsus so vigorously championed held one flagrant flaw in its basic theory – it over generalized. Based on the principles of the doctrine, all yellow flowers/roots were used to treat liver disorders, all hollow leaved plants were prescribed for respiratory discomfort, and all plants with heart shaped leaves were believed to treat heart ailments. The theory does hold true in some cases, garlic and onion both have hollow leaves and do possess decongestant properties, but they had been used in this manner for thousands of years. Despite its basic failing, the doctrine quickly became the new medical credo.

Paracelsus acted as his own pharmacist and chemist. He pioneered the chemical extraction of essential oils from the plant and further theorized that the physiological effects of plants were a result of active constituents within the plant. Through his experimentation, he introduced the use of antimony, mercury, arsenic, copper, silver and gold into therapeutic compounds. He also discovered the dose-response relationship; identifying that is was the amount of material prescribed that made certain plants poisonous. Paracelsus helped change the thinking of the medical community, brought recognition to the folk remedies of the vilified village wise woman and inspired a new field of pharmaceutical chemistry.

Following Paracelsus, Andreco Libarius wrote the first chemistry textbook, Alchemia, Johann Rudolph Glauber discovered sodium sulfate, and Friedrich Hoffman developed spiritus aetheris, drops containing alcohol and ether. The fields of chemistry and pharmacy continued to develop and pharmacognosy, the science of analyzing medicinal properties organic sources in their base form was born with the publication of Handbuch der Pharmalcognosie by Swiss professor Alexander Tschirch.

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