History, Regulation, Integrity, and Purity of Herbs and Supplements

Abstract

Herbs were our first source of medicine, and their use predates written history by several thousand years. No one knows when humans first used plants for medicine, but pollens of at least six medicinal plants were found in a Neanderthal burial site estimated to be at least 60,000 yr old (1). The early history of medicine parallels the history of herbal medicine: the first books written about medicine were also the first books written about herbs, including Chinese texts from 5000 yr ago, such as the famous herbal of the Yellow Emperor and the Egyptian text Ebers papyrus, written 3500 yr ago. In Western medicine, the father of modern medicine, Theophrastus, is also the father of modern botany. Theophrastus published the first book describing plants in detail in 320 Bc, which was also the first Western book about their medicinal uses.