50 Fun Facts About Medicinal Plants

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

Star anise at first supplied all of Tamiflu's shikimic acid, and its low yield was blamed for the drug's 2005 shortage until engineered E. coli began making part of the supply.

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

Madagascar periwinkle extract barely moved lab animals' blood sugar but wiped out their white blood cells, the clue that led Canadian researchers to test it against blood cancers.

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

Gin and tonic lost its medical point long ago: US rules cap tonic water's quinine at 83 parts per million, far below the dose once taken against malaria.

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

Heroin is said to take its trade name from the German heroisch, 'heroic', and it soon proved far more addictive than Bayer's advertising promised.

Which South American arrow poison did Montreal anaesthetists give a surgical patient as a muscle relaxant 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 is the popular story, and the plant's atropine really does it: the drug relaxes the muscle that narrows the pupil and is still used in drops before eye examinations.

Castor-oil seeds yield which protein toxin, blamed for the 1978 London 'umbrella murder' of dissident Georgi Markov?

Ricin does not dissolve in oil, so it stays behind in the crushed seed cake, which is why castor oil itself is a non-poisonous laxative.

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 thinking could do real harm: birthwort, long given in pregnancy because the plant was thought to resemble a womb, contains an acid that destroys the kidneys and causes cancer.

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's spiny name is said to refer to the bristly cone at the flower's centre, and Native Americans used the plant for toothache and coughs.

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

Allicin forms within seconds when the enzyme alliinase meets alliin in crushed tissue, which is why garlic releases its sharp smell only once a clove is cut.

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

St John's wort blooms around the feast of St John the Baptist, and it speeds the body's breakdown of many medicines, which can make birth control pills and other drugs less effective.

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, yet the same species supplies bakery poppy seeds, which carry enough opiate residue to trigger a positive drug test.

Which opium alkaloid, first isolated in France in 1832, takes its name from the Greek for 'poppy head'?

Codeine was found by Pierre Robiquet while he was refining ways to extract morphine, and the body converts part of each dose back into morphine, which is what dulls the pain.

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

Camphor comes from the wood of the camphor laurel, and the early plastics industry used it in immense quantities as the plasticiser that turns nitrocellulose into celluloid.

Which herb, also known as soldier's woundwort, has a genus name honouring Achilles' care of wounded men?

Yarrow's old folk name nosebleed cut both ways: leaves were packed into the nostril to staunch bleeding, or rolled up and pushed in to start one and ease a headache.

Aloe vera, the succulent whose gel is sold to soothe sunburn, is thought to be native to which region's Hajar Mountains?

Arabian Peninsula origins explain its fame: a 2015 DNA study concluded it beat some 500 other aloes to market because it grew near historic trade routes and was traded early.

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

All-heal is the sense of the Greek panakes, the root of panacea too, and such was the demand that wild American ginseng was overharvested for export and is now traded under CITES controls.

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 tree's bitter bark did English clergyman Edward Stone report to the Royal Society in 1763 as a cure for agues?

Willow bark's extraordinary bitterness reminded Stone of costly Peruvian bark, so he dried and powdered it and tried it on about fifty feverish people, an early step towards aspirin.

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

Dropsy is the old name for the fluid build-up, or oedema, that comes with heart failure, and drugs based on the compounds in Withering's foxglove are still prescribed for failing hearts.

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

Java's plantations of Ledger's high-quinine strain outcompeted British India's, so Japan's capture of the island in the Second World War cut the Allies off from their main supply of the drug.

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

Paracelsus's own laudanum was a costly mixture that held pearls as well as opium, and the plain alcohol tincture later sold under the name came from Thomas Sydenham in the 1660s.

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

Colchicine eases gout by calming the white blood cells that inflame the joint, but the gap between a helpful dose and a poisonous one is narrow, so overdose is a real risk.

Reserpine, an early antipsychotic and blood-pressure drug, was isolated in 1952 from the dried root of which Indian medicinal plant?

Indian snakeroot's reserpine drains the brain's stores of serotonin and noradrenaline, and the belief that it left patients depressed became a foundation of the chemical theory of depression.

Percy Julian's 1935 synthesis of the glaucoma drug physostigmine copied a compound from which West African ordeal poison?

Calabar bean was given to people accused of serious offences in Old Calabar, now in Nigeria: it was held to kill only the guilty, so anyone who survived the dose was declared innocent.

Warfarin grew out of a Wisconsin lab's hunt for what made cattle bleed to death after eating spoilt hay of which plant?

Sweet clover's bleeding agent proved to be dicoumarol, and the stronger relative that followed was sold as a rat poison before it reached patients, its name honouring the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

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

Mayapple's podophyllotoxin is so toxic that it is used only on the skin, against warts, and chemists had to rework it into less toxic relatives to make the cancer drugs.

A European patent on a plant fungicide was revoked in 2005 after campaigners showed Indian farmers had long used which tree's oil?

Neem oil had protected Indian crops for generations, so opponents led by a Green member of the European Parliament persuaded the patent office that the American-owned method involved no inventive step.

The Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita are founding texts of which traditional system of medicine?

Ayurveda's Charaka Samhita deals mainly with internal medicine, while the Sushruta Samhita describes surgery in detail, including rebuilding a nose.

Shennong, the legendary emperor credited with China's first herbal, is also said to have discovered which drink?

Tea, in one telling of the legend, was discovered when leaves from a nearby tree blew into water being boiled for Shennong, the 'Divine Farmer', who tried the brew.

Which 'living fossil' tree, native to China, supplies the leaf extract sold worldwide as a memory supplement?

Ginkgo is the last living species of its entire botanical order, yet large trials have found its extract does not prevent dementia or slow its progress.

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

Dioscorides gathered his knowledge while travelling as a surgeon with the armies of the emperor Nero, which let him study nearly 600 plants where they grew.

Which Egyptian scroll of about 1550 BCE, packed with hundreds of remedies, is named for the Egyptologist who bought it?

Ebers Papyrus remedies sit beside magic spells, yet the scroll also gives a surprisingly accurate account of the heart as the centre of a body-wide system of blood vessels.

Whose Canon of Medicine, completed in 1025, was still a standard textbook in European medical schools six centuries later?

Avicenna, the Persian polymath Ibn Sina, wrote the Canon in Arabic, and it was a Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona that carried it into Europe's medical schools.

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

Nicholas Culpeper wrote in plain English so that the poor, who could not afford physicians, could treat themselves, having already turned the physicians' Latin pharmacopoeia into English in 1649.

College of Hawaii chemist Alice Ball made chaulmoogra oil injectable, creating the first effective treatment for which disease?

Leprosy could at last be treated by injection once Ball turned the oil's fatty acids into water-soluble ethyl esters, but she died at 24 and others took credit for her method.

Epidiolex, approved by the FDA in 2018, is a purified cannabis compound prescribed for severe childhood forms of which condition?

Epilepsy syndromes Dravet and Lennox–Gastaut were its first targets, and its active ingredient is cannabidiol, the part of cannabis that does not intoxicate, rather than THC.

Vin Mariani, the 1860s French tonic wine that Pope Leo XIII endorsed on a poster, was Bordeaux steeped with which plant's leaves?

Coca leaves gave Vin Mariani its kick, and its success is thought to have inspired John Pemberton's French Wine Coca, which became Coca-Cola when a local prohibition law forced out the alcohol.

Which compound, the chief ingredient of sassafras oil and once root beer's flavour, 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 to Catherine de' Medici's court as a medicine around 1560?

Jean Nicot promoted tobacco as a cure for ailments from headaches to cancer, and Linnaeus later named the genus Nicotiana after him, which gave the world the word nicotine.

The cancer drug Taxol was first isolated from the bark of which conifer of north-western North America?

Pacific yew bark was collected in Washington State in 1962 by botanist Arthur Barclay, but the tree grows so slowly and so much bark was needed that trials of the drug were delayed.

China's secret Project 523, which produced the malaria drug artemisinin, was launched in 1967 to help which ally's troops?

North Vietnam's leader Ho Chi Minh asked Zhou Enlai for help as malaria crippled his troops, and the programme took its name from its launch date, 23 May.

Cinchona bark, the source of quinine, reached Europe in the 1600s under a nickname honouring which Catholic order?

Jesuits in Peru learned of the bark from Andean healers and sent it home as 'Jesuit's bark', and in 1820 the French chemists Pelletier and Caventou isolated its quinine.

Which plant-derived drug brought local anaesthesia to surgery in 1884, when Vienna's Karl Koller used it to numb a patient's eye?

Cocaine had been purified in Göttingen by Albert Niemann a quarter-century earlier, and Koller, a Vienna colleague of Sigmund Freud, was the one who saw that it numbed tissue.

Japanese chemist Nagai Nagayoshi isolated ephedrine from the Ephedra plant in 1885, then made which stimulant from it in 1893?

Methamphetamine was later issued to German soldiers in the Second World War to keep them alert, and in 1940s Japan factory workers took it to raise their output.

Tu Youyou won a 2015 Nobel Prize for extracting the malaria drug artemisinin from which traditional Chinese herb?

Sweet wormwood gave weak results until Tu Youyou read a fourth-century recipe by Ge Hong that steeped the herb in cold water, and switched to a low-temperature extraction that kept the drug intact.

Poison hemlock, a deadly relative of the carrot, famously killed which Athenian condemned to drink it in 399 BCE?

Socrates' death in Plato's Phaedo fits the plant's poison, coniine, which paralyses the muscles from the legs upward until breathing fails.

Which herb, nicknamed knitbone for its folk use on fractures, was pulled from US dietary supplements at the FDA's request in 2001?

Comfrey's pyrrolizidine alkaloids are toxic to the liver when swallowed, so the centuries-old wound herb is now confined to products for use on the skin.

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

Jaborandi leaves still supply the world's pilocarpine, which sets the salivary glands flowing, so the same drug is taken by mouth for the dry mouth of Sjögren's syndrome.