50 Fun Facts About Medicinal Plants

Oseltamivir, sold as Tamiflu, was first made from shikimic acid extracted from which Chinese spice?

Star anise was for years the only source of Tamiflu's shikimic acid, so pandemic stockpiling strained the spice supply until E. coli fermentation took over part of production by 2006.

Which flower, screened in the 1950s as a diabetes remedy, instead yielded the cancer drugs vinblastine and vincristine?

Madagascar periwinkle, also called graveyard plant and bright eyes, gave up its vinca alkaloids during 1950s screening for anti-diabetic drugs and is now farmed for chemotherapy.

Which cocktail began with British officers in the Raj making their bitter daily antimalarial quinine more palatable?

Gin and tonic took off after 1858, when the first commercial tonic water went on sale and the British military bought it in bulk, mixing it with lime against scurvy as well.

Which opium-derived drug did Bayer sell from 1898 as a 'non-addictive' morphine substitute and cough suppressant?

Heroin took its trade name from the German heroisch, 'heroic', and soon showed one of the highest addiction rates of any drug despite the advertising.

Which South American arrow poison was first given to a surgical patient as a muscle relaxant in Montreal in 1942?

Curare let Harold Griffith and Enid Johnson relax a patient's muscles during an appendectomy on 23 January 1942, and its main alkaloid is still called tubocurarine after the bamboo tubes it was packed in.

Belladonna, Italian for 'beautiful woman', is widely claimed to be named for women using its drops to do what?

Dilate their pupils was the claimed effect, and the plant's atropine, purified in the 1830s, remains one of the few deadly-nightshade compounds with accepted medical uses.

Castor-oil seeds yield which protein toxin, fired into dissident Georgi Markov's leg from a modified umbrella in 1978?

Ricin is not oil-soluble, so little of it ends up in castor oil, which is also heated past 80 °C to denature any that remains.

Which old idea, named in Jakob Böhme's 1621 book, held that a plant's looks reveal its cure, as walnuts for the head?

Doctrine of signatures logic gave eyebright and lungwort their names, yet no scientific or historical evidence shows plant shapes ever helped discover a medical use.

Which plant's root, a Chinese laxative for millennia, once fetched several times the price of opium or saffron?

Rhubarb's most prized grade was 'Russian rhubarb', valued for the quality-control system the Russian Empire ran on the trade, long before anyone baked the stalks into a pie.

Which coneflower, a folk medicine of Indigenous North Americans, takes its genus name from the Greek for 'hedgehog'?

Echinacea earned its spiny name from the bristly central disk of the flower, and archaeological evidence of its use as folk medicine reaches back to the 18th century.

Which compound, absent from intact garlic and formed only when the clove is damaged, was first isolated in 1944?

Allicin is made by the enzyme alliinase acting on alliin the moment tissue is cut, and Chester Cavallito and John Hays Bailey were the first to study it in the laboratory.

Which yellow-flowered herb, named for a midsummer feast on 24 June, is approved in the EU for mild depressive episodes?

St John's wort was traditionally gathered at the Midsummer festival that the church later made St John's Feast Day, and its petals carry black dots along their edges.

The opium poppy's Latin species name, somniferum, describes which effect of the dried latex from its seed pods?

Brings sleep is the sense of somniferum, a nod to the sedative opiates in the latex that the seed pods ooze when scored.

Which opium alkaloid, isolated in France in 1832 and now the world's most used opiate, is Greek for 'poppy head'?

Codeine was first isolated by Pierre Robiquet, and its name comes from the Ancient Greek kōdeia, the seed head of the poppy.

Which waxy aromatic solid, an Egyptian embalming ingredient and folk decongestant, comes from an East Asian laurel?

Camphor comes from the wood of Cinnamomum camphora, and Finnish chemist Gustaf Komppa published the first total synthesis of camphoric acid, the route to synthetic camphor, in 1903.

Which herb, called soldier's woundwort in the US Civil War, has a genus name honouring Achilles' care of wounded men?

Yarrow was used in ancient times to stop bleeding, and in the 16th century its crushed leaves were pressed into service against nosebleeds.

Aloe vera, a skin treatment in records since the fourth millennium BCE, is thought native to which region's Hajar range?

Arabian Peninsula highlands in north-eastern Oman and the eastern UAE are the likeliest homeland, and the genus name comes from the Arabic alloeh, 'bitter and shiny substance'.

Ginseng's genus name Panax, shared by the American and Asian species, comes from an Ancient Greek word meaning what?

All-heal is the meaning of the Greek pánax, while the English word ginseng comes from Teochew Chinese jîn-sim, 'person' plus a forked 'plant root'.

The '-spir-' in aspirin comes from Spiraea, the old genus of which wetland herb, an early source of salicylic acid?

Meadowsweet, then Spiraea ulmaria, gave its name to Spirsäure, the German term for salicylic acid, and Bayer added 'a' for acetyl and '-in' as a typical drug ending.

Which English chaplain's 1763 letter to the Royal Society reported powdered willow bark curing some 50 cases of ague?

Edward Stone dosed his ague sufferers over five years with success in all but a few severe cases, and his letter is the earliest known mention of willow bark against fever.

William Withering's 1785 Account of the Foxglove reported clinical trials of the plant against which swelling illness?

Dropsy, the old name for the fluid build-up now called oedema, was allegedly first treated by a Shropshire herbalist called Mother Hutton, a story invented in 1928 by an advertising illustrator.

Charles Ledger's high-quinine cinchona seeds, collected in Bolivia in 1865, were grown by the Dutch on which island?

Java got the seeds only after Ledger's Bolivian collector Manuel Incra Mamani spent four years watching frost destroy the high-quinine plants before finding a hardy specimen.

Laudanum, the opium tincture of the Romantic era, grew from the concoctions of which 16th-century Swiss alchemist?

Paracelsus recommended opium for reducing pain, and in the 1660s the English physician Thomas Sydenham popularised a proprietary opium tincture that he also named laudanum.

Which gout drug, first isolated in 1820 and still prescribed, is purified from the autumn crocus, or meadow saffron?

Colchicine's plant was recommended for rheumatism and swelling in an Egyptian papyrus of about 1500 BC, and a Colchicum extract was described for gout in a first-century AD herbal.

Reserpine, an early antipsychotic and blood-pressure drug, came in 1952 from the dried root of which Ayurvedic plant?

Indian snakeroot, or sarpagandha, is mentioned in Hindu manuscripts as long ago as 1000 BCE, and reserpine reached the market in 1954, two years after chlorpromazine.

Which West African ordeal poison's compound physostigmine, a glaucoma drug, did Percy Julian synthesise in 1935?

Calabar bean, or chopping nut, was prevalent in Efik culture as an ordeal poison, and physostigmine had already been used against glaucoma by Ludwig Laqueur in 1876.

Warfarin emerged after Karl Paul Link's Wisconsin lab traced cattle bleeding to death to spoilt hay of which plant?

Sweet clover's haemorrhagic agent turned out to be dicoumarol, and the warfarin that followed was patented in 1945 and first marketed as a rat poison, its name taken from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The cancer drugs etoposide and teniposide derive from podophyllotoxin, found in the rhizome of which American plant?

Mayapple rhizomes hold 0.3 to 1.0 percent podophyllotoxin by mass, and that lignan's skeleton was the starting point for both antitumour agents.

Which country's government fought a 1995 European patent on a neem fungicide until the patent office revoked it in 2005?

India argued that the process patented by W. R. Grace and the US Department of Agriculture had been in use there for more than 2,000 years, and the tree is native to the subcontinent yet now grown across the tropics.

Ayurveda's two surviving foundational texts are the surgical compendium of Sushruta and which work on internal medicine?

Charaka Samhita is attributed to a physician of the 1st to 2nd century CE and was later revised by Dṛḍhabala, whose additions are still read as part of the text.

The first Chinese book devoted wholly to herbs, 365 medicaments in three grades, is named for which legendary emperor?

Shennong's name sits on a text actually written between the first and second centuries AD, which sorted its herbs into upper, middle and low grades.

Which Ming physician spent over thirty years compiling the 1,892-entry Bencao Gangmu, first drafted in 1578?

Li Shizhen's son Li Jianyuan drew the illustrations for the 53-volume compendium, which was printed in Nanjing in 1596.

Which Greek army physician's five-volume herbal of around AD 50 to 70 stayed in use for more than 1,500 years?

Dioscorides covered about 600 medicinal plants and around 1,000 medicines made from them, and his book was only supplanted by revised Renaissance herbals.

Which 20-metre Egyptian scroll of about 1550 BCE, with over 800 remedies, is named for the Egyptologist who bought it?

Ebers Papyrus runs to 110 pages and was sold by Mohareb Todros to Egyptologist Georg Ebers in the winter of 1873–74, its 842 formulas mixing magic with folk remedies.

Whose 1025 Canon of Medicine, listing about 800 simple drugs, was still taught as background reading at Padua in 1715?

Avicenna, the Persian polymath Ibn Sina, listed the Canon's simple drugs alphabetically, and the work stayed on European university reading lists for centuries.

Which English herbalist-astrologer's 1652 English Physitian, pairing plants with planets, has never gone out of print?

Nicholas Culpeper had translated the London Pharmacopoeia from Latin for his master in his youth, and his herbal reached colonial America as the Complete Herbal.

Which College of Hawaii chemist made chaulmoogra oil injectable, the only effective leprosy treatment until the 1940s?

Alice Ball's trick was converting the oil's fatty acids into water-soluble ethyl esters, and after her death Arthur Dean published the work without crediting her.

Camptothecin, parent of the cancer drugs topotecan and irinotecan, comes from a Chinese species nicknamed what?

Happy tree, Camptotheca acuminata, a Chinese tree used in traditional medicine, gave up the compound in 1966 during systematic screening of natural products for anticancer drugs.

Which French chemist's 1860s coca-leaf Bordeaux won a Vatican gold medal and a poster endorsement from Pope Leo XIII?

Angelo Mariani's Vin Tonique Mariani was apparently the inspiration for John Pemberton's 1885 French Wine Coca, the forerunner of Coca-Cola.

Which compound, 90 percent of sassafras oil and the old flavour of root beer, did the FDA ban from food in 1960?

Safrole also flavoured chewing gum, toothpaste and soaps before the ban, and today it is watched as a precursor for making MDMA.

Which French ambassador to Portugal sent tobacco as a medicine to Catherine de' Medici's court in 1559?

Jean Nicot's samples went to the court as a medicine, and the genus named in his honour is the one from which the word nicotine is derived.

Which Research Triangle Institute pair isolated paclitaxel (Taxol) in 1971 from yew bark collected in 1962?

Wall and Wani's compound came from bark that botanist Arthur Barclay stripped from a single Pacific yew north of Packwood, Washington, on 21 August 1962.

Which secret Chinese military programme, begun in 1967 at Ho Chi Minh's behest, produced the malaria drug artemisinin?

Project 523 got going after Zhou Enlai convinced Mao Zedong to back Ho Chi Minh's request, and its traditional-medicine arm found the artemisinins that won Tu Youyou a 2015 Nobel Prize.

Which two French researchers first isolated quinine from cinchona bark in 1820, having found strychnine as well?

Pelletier and Caventou's quinine was the first chemical compound known to treat an infectious disease, and it stayed the antimalarial of choice until the 1940s.

Which Göttingen chemist isolated coca's chief alkaloid in 1859 and gave it the name cocaine?

Albert Niemann's 1859 isolation came a quarter-century before the alkaloid's 1884 debut as a local anaesthetic in eye surgery.

Which Japanese chemist isolated ephedrine from Ephedra in 1885 and synthesised methamphetamine from it in 1893?

Nagai Nagayoshi recognised ephedrine as the active component of ma huang, a plant Chinese physicians had used against asthma and bronchitis for centuries.

Tu Youyou's clue to steep sweet wormwood in cold water came from a text written in 340 by which Chinese alchemist?

Ge Hong's handbook said the herb should be steeped in cold water, and Tu Youyou volunteered as the first human test subject for the extract that followed.

Poison hemlock, an ancient medicine and medieval rabies remedy taken in wine, famously killed which condemned Athenian?

Socrates took an infusion of hemlock after being sentenced to death at his trial, and medieval physicians still gave the plant, with betony and fennel seed, for 'the bite of mad dogge'.

Which herb, nicknamed knitbone for its folk use on fractures, had its internal-use products banned by the FDA in 2001?

Comfrey's pyrrolizidine alkaloids are what damage the liver, and its Latin name Symphytum comes from the Greek for bones growing together.

Pilocarpine, a glaucoma drug isolated in 1874, comes only from the leaves of a South American shrub known as what?

Jaborandi leaves, specifically those of Pilocarpus microphyllus, supply all commercial pilocarpine, which is also taken by mouth for the dry mouth of Sjögren's disease.