50 Fun Facts About Traditional Medicine

Powdered bark from which tree, praised for curing fevers in 1763, later led chemists toward aspirin?

Willow bark holds salicin, which Johann Buchner crystallised in 1828. Bayer settled on the name Aspirin for its related synthetic drug in 1899.

Which US president died in 1799 after doctors treating a throat infection drained several pints of blood?

George Washington believed in bleeding and had his overseer open a vein before any doctor arrived. His physicians then bled him several more times, and he died that night.

Which ancient remains, ground to powder, did chemist Robert Boyle praise as a useful medicine for falls and bruises?

Mummies were ground into a drug called mummia that European apothecaries sold from the 12th century. After exports were banned in the 16th century, some faked it by embalming fresh corpses.

Which animal most often supplied the unicorn horn that apothecaries sold as a universal antidote until the 18th century?

Narwhal tusks, which are really overgrown teeth, were traded as unicorn horn for centuries. Danish kings even had a throne made from them.

In 1916 US chemists found that Clark Stanley's famous liniment contained none of which ingredient named on its label?

Snake oil was missing entirely: the liniment was mostly mineral oil with chili pepper extract and turpentine. Stanley's $20 fine helped turn the name into a byword for fraud.

Which creatures, long used by doctors to draw blood from patients, did the US FDA classify as a medical device in 2004?

Leeches made a comeback in 1970s microsurgery, where they keep blood moving through reattached fingers and ears. Their bite injects an anticoagulant called hirudin.

Physician William Withering's 1785 study of a folk cure for dropsy revealed the heart drug in which garden flower?

Foxglove was the active part of a secret recipe an old woman had long kept to herself. Its heart compounds, such as digitoxin, take their names from Digitalis, the plant's Latin name.

Which food, a folk dressing for wounds since ancient Greece, now comes in medical grades approved for minor burns?

Honey in medical grades is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for minor wounds and burns. Early evidence suggests some burns heal four to five days faster under it.

Which tradesmen once carried out bloodletting, a job recalled by the red and white pole outside their shops?

Barbers did the bleeding that physicians recommended. On the striped pole, the red stands for blood and the white for bandages.

Researchers watched which wild ape, named Rakus, heal a facial wound by applying chewed leaves of a medicinal vine?

A Sumatran orangutan pressed the chewed pulp onto an open wound on his face. Five days later it had closed, and within weeks only a small scar was left.

The name Ayurveda joins words for life and knowledge taken from which classical language of India?

Sanskrit ayus means life or longevity and veda means knowledge. The earliest classical works on the system divide medicine into eight components.

Ayurveda holds that good health depends on balancing three doshas: vata, pitta and which other?

Kapha is the dosha of earth and water, often glossed as phlegm. Vata is tied to air, and pitta to fire and bile.

Which healing tradition of South and Central Asia, built on medieval Arabic medicine, has a name that means Greek?

Unani rests on the teachings of the physicians of ancient Greece, handed on in Arabic. Its name goes back to Ionia, a region on the eastern Aegean coast.

Which ancient Greek physician, traditionally called the father of medicine, taught that four body fluids govern health?

Hippocrates saw illness as an imbalance of these fluids, the humours. Treatments such as bleeding and purging were meant to expel whichever one was in surplus.

Followers of the four humours blamed an excess of yellow bile for which of the classical temperaments?

Choleric people were thought ambitious, decisive and short-tempered. Black bile, melaina kholé in Greek, gave its name to the melancholy type instead.

The ancient Indian text Sushruta Samhita describes rebuilding which body part with a flap of skin from the cheek?

The nose could be rebuilt after it had been cut off, an operation now called rhinoplasty. The same treatise describes 1,120 illnesses and 700 medicinal plants.

Which old belief held that a plant resembling a body part would heal it, so walnuts were prescribed for head ailments?

Doctrine of signatures thinking also made eyebright a treatment for eye infections, because its flower was supposed to look like an eye.

Which traditional Chinese therapy did UNESCO add to its intangible heritage list in 2010 together with moxibustion?

Acupuncture was inscribed after China nominated the pair. Gold and silver needles from a tomb of about 100 BC may be the earliest physical evidence of it.

Tu Youyou won a Nobel Prize after a recipe from the year 340 led her to a malaria drug in which herb?

Sweet wormwood had long been used for intermittent fevers. The old text said to steep it in cold water, which led Tu to a low-temperature extraction that worked.

Which golden-yellow spice, long used in Ayurvedic medicine, is pasted on brides and grooms before many Hindu weddings?

Turmeric owes its colour to curcumin. Despite centuries of use, there is no high-quality clinical evidence that eating it treats any disease.

Twigs of which tree, also known as Indian lilac, are traditionally chewed in southern India to clean the teeth?

Neem twigs double as toothbrushes in the Middle East as well. The tree is a member of the mahogany family and also goes by the name margosa.

Which succulent from the Arabian Peninsula supplies the gel used in many lotions for minor burns and insect bites?

Aloe vera is thought to be native to the Hajar Mountains of Oman and the UAE. It now grows wild in tropical and arid climates around the world.

Which pungent root, used for centuries in traditional medicine across Asia, is often taken for nausea in pregnancy?

Ginger may beat a placebo for pregnancy sickness, though the evidence is of low quality. There is no good evidence that it helps with nausea from chemotherapy.

Which daisy-like herb, widely drunk as a tea, can trigger allergic reactions in people sensitive to ragweed?

Chamomile is a name shared by several daisy-like plants. Besides tea, it is used to flavour beer and is even grown as a seating plant in gardens.

Which coneflower of the Great Plains, used by some Native American tribes for cold symptoms, is sold as a cold remedy?

Echinacea is said to owe its modern fame to a Swiss supplement maker who heard of its use in South Dakota. A 2014 meta-analysis found no conclusive proof that it prevents or treats colds.

Oil from which spice, rich in the compound eugenol, is a traditional remedy for the pain of toothache?

Cloves are the flower buds of a tree native to the Maluku Islands. There is evidence that their oil does ease toothache and other kinds of pain.

Which herb, named for a saint's feast day on 24 June, is approved in the European Union for mild depression?

St John's wort was gathered at midsummer and hung on doors to ward off evil spirits. It can interfere with other medicines by speeding up their breakdown in the body.

Bark from which South American tree, nicknamed the fever tree, gave the world the malaria drug quinine?

Cinchona bark was so prized that Peru and its neighbours outlawed the export of seeds and saplings in the 19th century. Peru's national tree belongs to the genus.

Which island is the only native home of the rose periwinkle, source of the cancer drugs vincristine and vinblastine?

Madagascar gave the plant one of its common names. The cancer drugs were a chance find of the 1950s, when researchers were screening it for anti-diabetic compounds.

Sangoma, a word used loosely for every kind of traditional healer in southern Africa, comes from which language?

Zulu speakers separate the sangoma, who heals mainly through divination, from the inyanga, a herbalist working with plant and animal medicines.

Which Amazonian brew, used by Indigenous healers, has a Quechua name meaning spirit rope or liana of the soul?

Ayahuasca is boiled from a jungle vine and a second plant that contains the psychedelic DMT. Some evidence suggests it spread across the western Amazon only within the past few centuries.

Which low, dome-shaped hut do Plains peoples of North America use for a ceremony of prayer, healing and purification?

Sweat lodge ceremonies are meant to be led only by Indigenous Elders who know the songs, language and safety protocols. The Aztecs of Mexico had a sweat bath rite of their own, the temazcal.

The root of which Pacific pepper plant is ground and strained into a communal bowl to make a traditional drink?

Kava was historically grown only on Pacific islands such as Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Hawaii. Its Latin name, Piper methysticum, means intoxicating pepper.

Which plant-based arrow poison of South American hunters later gave anaesthetists a muscle relaxant for surgery?

Curare kills prey by paralysing the breathing muscles, yet it is harmless when swallowed. Before such relaxants, patients needed much larger doses of anaesthetic.

Leaves of which Andean plant, chewed for at least 8,000 years, are considered a remedy for altitude sickness?

Coca acts as a mild stimulant when chewed or brewed as tea. Taken this way it is absorbed slowly, and there is no evidence of addiction or withdrawal symptoms.

Kampo, a herbal tradition that grew out of Chinese medicine introduced from the 7th century, belongs to which country?

Japan's health ministry approved four Kampo medicines for reimbursement under National Health Insurance in 1967. The name Kampo itself simply means Chinese medicine.

Jamu, a tradition of herbal drinks added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2023, comes from which country?

Indonesia's jamu is generally prepared and prescribed by women, many of whom sell it in the streets. The word itself comes from Javanese.

Rongoā, a healing tradition using native plants such as kawakawa and kūmarahou, was developed by which people?

Māori experts called tohunga passed the knowledge on by word of mouth. New Zealand's Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907 targeted the practice.

Sowa Rigpa, a medical system whose Four Tantras diagnose by pulse, tongue and urine, developed in which region?

Tibet's system took shape in the 8th century, when King Trisong Detsen's medical council drew in knowledge from Greece, Persia, India and China.

Friedrich Sertürner isolated which painkiller from opium in 1804 and named it after the Greek god of dreams?

Morphine began as morphium, a nod to Morpheus, because the drug tends to cause sleep. Sertürner, who isolated it, was a German pharmacist.

Folklore held that which root screamed when dug up, killing all who heard, so a dog was used to pull it?

Mandrake was feared enough that the ancient writer Josephus described using a dog as a stand-in to uproot it. Another superstition sent anyone who pulled it up to hell.

In the 1780s the Royal Humane Society placed kits along the Thames to revive the drowned with an enema of what?

Tobacco smoke was pumped in with a bellows. The practice declined after 1811, when Benjamin Brodie's animal experiments showed that nicotine is toxic.

Which Greek god of healing carries the staff, entwined with a single serpent, that serves as a symbol of medicine?

Asclepius's rod is often confused with the caduceus, which has two serpents and a pair of wings and is sometimes misused as a medical emblem.

Which Greek army physician wrote De Materia Medica, a five-volume guide to herbal drugs read for more than 1,500 years?

Dioscorides was regarded for almost two millennia as the most prominent writer on plants and plant drugs, earning him the title father of pharmacognosy.

Which German abbess of the 12th century, also a celebrated composer, wrote Physica on the healing uses of plants?

Hildegard of Bingen filled Physica's nine books with the properties of plants, stones, fish and animals. More of her chants survive than of any other medieval composer.

Which 17th-century English herbalist and astrologer wrote The English Physitian, later known as the Complete Herbal?

Nicholas Culpeper published in plain English on purpose, as self-help for the poor who could not afford physicians, at a time when the College of Physicians could not enforce its ban.

Which Swiss alchemist, credited as the father of toxicology, argued that only the dose makes a substance poisonous?

Paracelsus held that what poisons in large doses may cure in small ones. His first medical pamphlet argued that syphilis could be treated with carefully measured mercury.

Yarrow's genus name honours which Greek hero, said in legend to have carried the herb to treat his army's wounds?

Achilles, the story goes, learned the herb's use from the centaur Chiron. The Chumash people boiled yarrow and held the liquid in the mouth to ease toothache.

Which stony mass from an animal's gut, with a Persian name meaning antidote, was believed to neutralise any poison?

Bezoar stones have one real power: modern tests found that they can pull arsenic out of a solution. A drinking glass holding one was said to make any poison harmless.

In 1536 St. Lawrence Iroquoians saved Jacques Cartier's dying crew from which disease with a tea of boiled tree needles?

Scurvy is a lack of vitamin C, which the needle tea was later shown to contain. The tree, called aneda, is generally believed to have been eastern white cedar.