Medicinal plants have been used throughout history to heal the sick. Carbon dating from ancient Babylon (Iraq) indicates that plants were cultivated as medicines 60,000 years ago. It is thought that the ancient Greeks and Romans learned from these earlier civilisations and began to keep written records of their own discoveries at least 2500 years ago, with written records beginning earlier in India, China and Egypt.
One of the most outstanding figures of Western medicine, the Greek physician Hippocrates, living around 400 BC and often referred to as the "father of modern medicine"', is said to have used only food, medicinal plants and lifestyle advice to heal his patients. He is known for the saying "let food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food". The core principles and medicines formulated by him and his successors read strangely modern and are increasingly validated today.
If the history of human medicine was condensed into a relative period of one hour, everything except for the last minute would be dominated by plant medicine. Even in New Zealand, plant medicine was taught at medical schools well into the middle of the 20th century.
A variety of factors including technological advances, economical and political shifts resulted in the declining use of traditional plant medicine in many Western societies throughout the 20th century. New discoveries of powerful synthetic medicines such as antibiotics, and different ways of measuring the effectiveness of medicines such as randomised control trials, resulted in the marginalisation of traditional knowledge that had been passed down through generations of healthcare practitioners.
However, because of the rise in degenerative and chronic illnesses, limited biomedical options for treating many ailments safely, and the threat of loss of effectiveness of Western "miracle drugs" such as antibiotics, this hiatus has been short-lived.
