Written by Vicki Pitman
Herbal medicine has been used for thousands of years and has a fascinating and rich history. This article delves into some of Western herbal medicine’s ancient Greek roots.
In the 1990s I delved back into the origins of Western herbal medicine. They can be traced through evidence in texts, artefacts and archaeology primarily to ancient Greek peoples who inhabited areas around the Mediterranean from Marseille and southern Italy to the Greek peninsula and western parts of modern Turkey.
Oral traditions of healing date back some 3,000 years; there are instances of healing with herbs in the epics of Homer. More extensive evidence appears from the 6th century BC. Healing practices were derived from the lived experience of people interacting with and learning from animals and plants and sifting out what worked practically as medicine. Initially such practices were acknowledged as coming from deities such as Apollo, Artemis and demigods such as Chiron and Aesclepius, who was at first a hero but later raised to the status of a god.
The writings of Hippocrates
Many are familiar with Hippocrates being considered the ‘father’ of medicine, and with his aphorisms such as ‘Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food’ or ‘Nature knows best’. But in fact Hippocrates and his fellow physicians have much more to impart. I discovered this when I read their writings in detail in the English translation of the Hippocratic Corpus, and strove to understand the milieu in which they were written. The Corpus comprises roughly 60 treatises written by different physician-healers in the late 5th century and the early decades of the 4th century BC.
Written texts on this scale were a recent development. The texts include a diverse range of topics and reflect differing, sometimes even contradictory theories, as the authors explored and tried to establish just what is the best approach for discovering the causes of disease, and what are the best methods and medicines to relieve suffering. They detail the powers of botanical medicines and how to apply them, based on insights into how the body in a holistic sense is constituted and responds to disease as well as lifestyle and environmental factors.
Practical, theoretical and philosophical insights are evidenced in ancient medical texts. The physicians’ experience and their writings were so transformational that they were collected together, studied and revered from that era and on into the next 2000 years.
Revolutions of wisdom
What is not often appreciated is the conceptual background amongst Greeks of this time. From about the 6th century BC, Greeks in both a practical and a philosophical sense innovatively began to explore the origins of human existence, of the universe, the phenomenal world and the human body in radical new ways. Their insights contrasted with the traditional gods-centred view of their societies, in which certain gods were associated with healing and teaching medical skills – e.g. Apollo, Artemis, Aescleplius. Instead these early thinkers conceived unifying eternal principles.
The Kosmos is the divine ultimate source and sustainer of everything. The Kosmos was also spoken of as the “Holos” or Whole – a term often found in the medical writings and from which we derive the word ‘holistic’. Some writers particularly emphasised Nature (in Greek physis from which we get the words physician, physics) itself as the divine principle in the phenomenal realm. Nature is a universal force combining elements of fire, water, earth and air, and including a fifth element aither, which regulates their qualities of heat, cold, moisture and dryness in the world of living things, the earth, climate, weather and so on.
For example, Empedocles (c 494-434 BC) describes the workings of Nature in terms of the divine Sphere, within which the forces of Love and Strife attract or disrupt the harmonious “mixture” of the elements, and qualities and forms which derive from them. The medical authors sought to understand the individual constitution – how the elements and qualities expressed themselves in the body, how the parts of the body are all interconnected and sensitive to one another. Human existence is a microcosm of the universal macrocosm, so understanding and living according to the laws of Nature fosters harmony both with the phenomenal world and with our best self. Some thinkers describe the ultimate purpose of humans is to find their true nature by returning to union with the Divine principle within.
That there was a close relationship between Greek philosophical ideas and medicine is revealed in Plato’s Symposium. Each guest at the dinner is invited to speak on Love. Plato (c 427-347 BC) includes a physician, Erixymachus, as one of the guest, whose words echo the themes above:
“The business of what we call medicine, which is, in a word, the knowledge of the principles of love at work in the body in regard to repletion and evacuation. The most skilful doctor is the doctor who can distinguish between noble and base loves in this sphere, and the man who can cause a body to change the latter for the former and can implant love in a body which lacks but needs it, and remove it where it already exists, will be a good practitioner. He must be able to bring elements in the body which are most hostile to one another into mutual affections and love; such hostile elements are the opposites hot and cold, wet and dry and the like; it was by knowing how to create love and harmony between these that our forefather Asclepius, as our poets say and as I believe, founded our craft.” (1)
This world view is amply reflected in the writings of Hippocratic physicians who endeavoured to follow the ‘healing power of Nature’ as guide in medical practice, by which they meant a scrupulous, rational study of the natural world and human body in order to derive knowledge and the skills with which to both to maintain health and treat diseases. This continued to form the background to subsequent medical practices and texts in subsequent centuries.
Medical practices, food and herbs
Ancient medicine recognised the importance of foods and dietary regimens for both health and in treating disease. This was combined with exercise, rest and therapeutic baths and amplified with a pharmacy of medicinal herbs, and the therapeutic uses of oils, waxes, wines, waters, clays and minerals (blood-letting is evidenced but not routine). In the Hippocratic work Regimen II. LIV. (2), the author describes the qualities of many herbs and foods, along with their effects on the body: “Purslane when fresh cools, when preserved it warms… Mint warms, passes easily by urine, and stops vomiting” – an effect we still observe today (2).
The Hippocratic physicians were the first to practise recording the case histories of individual patients and the outcomes of their treatments. These can be read in the work of several Epidemics treatises where we find individually named persons, with their addresses recorded. This invaluable approach has continued through the centuries to be a feature of Western medicine.
We learn more of early herbal pharmacy, the way the actions of herbs were understood, how they were sourced and applied from the writings of Theopharastus (c317-287 BC) and Dioscorides (c40-90 AD).
Theophrastus was a pupil and later the successor to Aristotle in the Lyceum school in Athens. Inspired by Aristotle’s systematic investigative approach to nature, he focused on the plant kingdom and is credited with being the first botanist, although he also thought and wrote about many other topics. He left two surviving works on plants, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants. These include many medicinal herbs with details of how they were gathered or cultivated, and used practically. He carefully observed plants in terms of their forms, and modes of reproduction, for which he is credited with being the first botanist. These works later became inspirational to the renewal of learning during the Renaissance, and for Linnaeus himself.
Dioscorides’s De Matiera Medica – On the Materials of Medicine – is a Greek text of five volumes which includes about 850 medicinal substances, the majority of which are herbs. It survived into the early modern medicine via translations in Aramaic, Arabic, and then Latin, becoming accessible in English with a first inclusion of his information in Henry Lyte’s A Niewe Herbal, 1578, which itself was based on Flemish and French translations. Take a look at Dioscorides’s text (3).
Fast forward to the 1980s when Professor John Riddle re-evaluated Dioscorides’ understanding of the effects of the herbs. Though Dioscorides didn’t have the benefit of modern biochemistry, Riddle found his grouping together of herbs with “drug affinities” revealed accurate knowledge of their effects in and on the human body, as confirmed by modern chemical analysis of their properties (4).
Galen of Pergamon (c129-216 AD) was a Greek physician living several hundred years after Hippocrates during the early Roman Empire. He became physician to the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Galen built on the learning of previous generations. He revered ‘Hippocrates’ and based his approach to medicine on the texts which had been gathered together under his name. However, though ‘following’ Hippocrates in all things, as he saw it, he in fact applied himself to discovering more about the human body, developed innovative methods of treatment and took advantage of the expanded repertory of medicinal herbs available from the empire. He emphasised using the importance of understanding the patient in his or her full complexity, based on judging the ‘mixture’ or temperaments of the elements in the individual. These influence not only the condition but the person’s response to treatments.
Like the Hippocratic physician, his therapy was to be tailored to the patient. This constitutional approach was not always possible, of course. Galen was for a time a physician to gladiators where he practised what today would be emergency medicine, and he paid close attention to the effects of their wounds, and the internal workings of the body which they revealed. He applied his skills as a surgeon, using the medicines of the day in wound healing.
In his prolific writings he called for the use of the best quality of medicines, he emphasised that the physician must carry out investigations of his own into the body and the herbal medicines, not relying on received convention, in order to understand from his own experience. His results were constrained by the context of the times; some things he got wrong. He made significant advances in knowledge himself, discovering the difference between venous and arterial circulation, and theorising that the blood received oxygen from the lungs.
There are many other ancient writers whose texts survive, for example Pliny, Celsus, Soranus, Rufus of Ephesus, Alexander of Tralles. The knowledge of these earliest practitioners was essentially still the basis of medicine and domestic medicine until the discoveries of pharmaceutical sciences in the 19th and especially 20th century, for example, the anti-inflammatory effects of aspirin and quinine, and the role of anti-biotics. Yet aspirin was derived from the age-old use of willow bark for fevers, quinine from the South American use of cinchona bark, and digoxin from the folk use of the foxglove.
Since the last quarter of the 20th century traditional medicines – previously dismissed as of little use and “merely old wives tales” have not only been sought after again by the public but become the subject of research and development as a source for new orthodox medicines. For example, Dr. Cassandra Quave’s work at Emory University (6).
With the acceleration of science and its discoveries from the mid-19th century and continuing today herbalists have responded with innovations in training and practice, mindful to incorporate what is useful and appropriate for the best interests of their patients. They also learn and adopt from their own experience improved therapeutic approaches, selecting the herbal prescription for a patient both in the light of ongoing research and holistically according to the patient’s individual nature and circumstances. They also continue to use many of the herbs in the ancient pharmacy, such as St John’s wort, agnus castus, yarrow, walnut, vervain. By doing my own research, I realised how the influence of the roots of Greek medicine continues to flow like a living sap into the many branches of modern herbalism (5).
References
- Hamilton, Walter. Translator. Plato The Symposium. Harmmondsworth, England: Penguin Classics, 1971.
- Jones, W.H.S. Translator. Hippocrates, Volume IV. London: William Heinemann, 1979.
- Several blogs on the Herbal Research Network website address topics in the history of Western herbal medicine and include many more resources and references.
- Riddle, John. Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.
- Pitman Vicki. The Nature of the Whole, Holism in Ancient Greek and Indian Medicine. New Delhi: Motilal Barnasidass, 2006.
- Quave C. Quave Research Group. Etnobotanica.us. https://etnobotanica.us/. Published 2022. Accessed August 30, 2022.
