1.
Botany
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Botany, also called plant science, plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who specialises in this field, the term botany comes from the Ancient Greek word βοτάνη meaning pasture, grass, or fodder, βοτάνη is in turn derived from βόσκειν, to feed or to graze. Nowadays, botanists study approximately 410,000 species of plants of which some 391,000 species are vascular plants. Medieval physic gardens, often attached to monasteries, contained plants of medical importance and they were forerunners of the first botanical gardens attached to universities, founded from the 1540s onwards. One of the earliest was the Padua botanical garden and these gardens facilitated the academic study of plants. Efforts to catalogue and describe their collections were the beginnings of plant taxonomy, in the last two decades of the 20th century, botanists exploited the techniques of molecular genetic analysis, including genomics and proteomics and DNA sequences to classify plants more accurately. Modern botany is a broad, multidisciplinary subject with inputs from most other areas of science, dominant themes in 21st century plant science are molecular genetics and epigenetics, which are the mechanisms and control of gene expression during differentiation of plant cells and tissues. Botany originated as herbalism, the study and use of plants for their medicinal properties, many records of the Holocene period date early botanical knowledge as far back as 10,000 years ago. This early unrecorded knowledge of plants was discovered in ancient sites of human occupation within Tennessee, the early recorded history of botany includes many ancient writings and plant classifications. Examples of early works have been found in ancient texts from India dating back to before 1100 BC, in archaic Avestan writings. His major works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, constitute the most important contributions to science until the Middle Ages. De Materia Medica was widely read for more than 1,500 years, important contributions from the medieval Muslim world include Ibn Wahshiyyas Nabatean Agriculture, Abū Ḥanīfa Dīnawarīs the Book of Plants, and Ibn Bassals The Classification of Soils. In the early 13th century, Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, and Ibn al-Baitar wrote on botany in a systematic and scientific manner and these gardens continued the practical value of earlier physic gardens, often associated with monasteries, in which plants were cultivated for medical use. They supported the growth of botany as an academic subject, lectures were given about the plants grown in the gardens and their medical uses demonstrated. Botanical gardens came much later to northern Europe, the first in England was the University of Oxford Botanic Garden in 1621, throughout this period, botany remained firmly subordinate to medicine. German physician Leonhart Fuchs was one of the three German fathers of botany, along with theologian Otto Brunfels and physician Hieronymus Bock, Fuchs and Brunfels broke away from the tradition of copying earlier works to make original observations of their own. Bock created his own system of plant classification, physician Valerius Cordus authored a botanically and pharmacologically important herbal Historia Plantarum in 1544 and a pharmacopoeia of lasting importance, the Dispensatorium in 1546. Naturalist Conrad von Gesner and herbalist John Gerard published herbals covering the medicinal uses of plants, naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi was considered the father of natural history, which included the study of plants
2.
Plant
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Plants are mainly multicellular, predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. The term is generally limited to the green plants, which form an unranked clade Viridiplantae. This includes the plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts, mosses and the green algae. Green plants have cell walls containing cellulose and obtain most of their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts and their chloroplasts contain chlorophylls a and b, which gives them their green color. Some plants are parasitic and have lost the ability to produce amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize. Plants are characterized by sexual reproduction and alternation of generations, although reproduction is also common. There are about 300–315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, green plants provide most of the worlds molecular oxygen and are the basis of most of Earths ecologies, especially on land. Plants that produce grains, fruits and vegetables form humankinds basic foodstuffs, Plants play many roles in culture. They are used as ornaments and, until recently and in variety, they have served as the source of most medicines. The scientific study of plants is known as botany, a branch of biology, Plants are one of the two groups into which all living things were traditionally divided, the other is animals. The division goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who distinguished between plants, which generally do not move, and animals, which often are mobile to catch their food. Much later, when Linnaeus created the basis of the system of scientific classification. Since then, it has become clear that the plant kingdom as originally defined included several unrelated groups, however, these organisms are still often considered plants, particularly in popular contexts. When the name Plantae or plant is applied to a group of organisms or taxon. The evolutionary history of plants is not yet settled. Those which have been called plants are in bold, the way in which the groups of green algae are combined and named varies considerably between authors. Algae comprise several different groups of organisms which produce energy through photosynthesis, most conspicuous among the algae are the seaweeds, multicellular algae that may roughly resemble land plants, but are classified among the brown, red and green algae. Each of these groups also includes various microscopic and single-celled organisms
3.
Medicinal plants
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Medicinal plants, medicinal herbs, or simply herbs have been identified and used from prehistoric times. Plants make many chemical compounds for biological functions, including defence against insects, fungi, over 12,000 active compounds are known to science. These chemicals work on the body in exactly the same way as pharmaceutical drugs. However, since a plant may contain many substances, the effects of taking a plant as medicine can be complex. The earliest historical records of herbs are found from the Sumerian civilisation, drug research makes use of ethnobotany to search for pharmacologically active substances in nature, and has in this way discovered hundreds of useful compounds. These include the common drugs aspirin, digoxin, quinine, the compounds found in plants are of many kinds, but most are in four major biochemical classes, the alkaloids, glycosides, polyphenols, and terpenes. Medicinal plants are used to treat disease in non-industrialized societies. The annual global export value of plants in 2012 was over US$2.2 billion. Plants, including many now used as herbs and spices, have been used as medicines from prehistoric times. Spices have been used partly to counter food spoilage bacteria, especially in hot climates, angiosperms were the original source of most plant medicines. Human settlements are surrounded by weeds useful as medicines, such as nettle, dandelion. Humans were not alone in using herbs as medicines, some such as non-human primates, monarch butterflies. Plant samples from prehistoric sites are among the lines of evidence that Paleolithic peoples had knowledge of herbal medicine. The mushroom was used to treat whipworm. In ancient Sumeria, hundreds of plants including myrrh and opium are listed on clay tablets. The ancient Egyptian Ebers Papyrus lists over 800 plant medicines such as aloe, cannabis, castor bean, garlic, juniper, the Chinese pharmacopoeia, the Shennong Ben Cao Jing records plant medicines such as chaulmoogra for leprosy, ephedra, and hemp. This was expanded in the Tang Dynasty Yaoxing Lun, in the fourth century BC, Aristotles pupil Theophrastus wrote the first systematic botany text, Historia plantarum. In the Early Middle Ages, Benedictine monasteries preserved medical knowledge in Europe, translating and copying classical texts, hildegard of Bingen wrote Causae et Curae on medicine
4.
Dietary supplement
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A dietary supplement is intended to provide nutrients that may otherwise not be consumed in sufficient quantities. Supplements as generally understood include vitamins, minerals, fiber, fatty acids, or amino acids, U. S. authorities define dietary supplements as foods, while elsewhere they may be classified as drugs or other products. There are more than 50,000 dietary supplements available, more than half of the U. S. adult population consume dietary supplements with most common ones being multivitamins. These products are not intended to prevent or treat any disease and in some circumstances are dangerous, for those who fail to consume a balanced diet, the agency says that certain supplements may have value. Most supplements should be avoided, and usually people should not eat micronutrients except people with clearly shown deficiency and those people should first consult a doctor. An exception is vitamin D, which is recommended in Nordic countries due to weak sunlight, the product is labeled as a dietary supplement. In the United States, the FDA has different monitoring procedures for substances depending on whether they are presented as drugs, food additives, food, or dietary supplements. Dietary supplements are eaten or taken by mouth, and are regulated in United States law as a type of rather than a type of drug. The intended use of dietary supplements is to ensure that a person gets enough essential nutrients, Dietary supplements should not be used to treat any disease or as preventive healthcare. An exception to this recommendation is the use of vitamins. Supplements may create harm in several ways, including over-consumption, particularly of minerals, the products may also cause harm related to their rapid absorption in a short period of time, quality issues such as contamination, or by adverse interactions with other foods and medications. There are many types of dietary supplements, Vitamin is an organic compound required by an organism as a vital nutrient in limited amounts. An organic chemical compound is called a vitamin when it cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities by an organism, thus, the term is conditional both on the circumstances and on the particular organism. For example, ascorbic acid is a vitamin for humans, supplementation is important for the treatment of certain health problems but there is little evidence of benefit when used by those who are otherwise healthy. Amino acids are biologically important organic compounds composed of amine and carboxylic acid functional groups, the key elements of an amino acid are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, though other elements are found in the side-chains of certain amino acids. Amino acids can be divided into three categories, essential amino acids, non-essential amino acids, and conditional amino acids, essential amino acids cannot be made by the body, and must be supplied by food. Non-essential amino acids are made by the body from essential amino acids or in the breakdown of proteins. Conditional amino acids are not essential, except in times of illness, stress
5.
Traditional medicine
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Traditional medicine comprises medical aspects of traditional knowledge that developed over generations within various societies before the era of modern medicine. In some Asian and African countries, up to 80% of the population relies on traditional medicine for their health care needs. When adopted outside of its culture, traditional medicine is often called alternative medicine. Core disciplines which study traditional medicine include herbalism, ethnomedicine, ethnobotany, the line between alternative medicine and quackery is a contentious subject. Traditional medicine may include formalized aspects of medicine, that is to say longstanding remedies passed on. Folk medicine may also be referred to as traditional medicine, alternative medicine, indigenous medicine and these terms are often considered interchangeable, even though some authors may prefer one or the other because of certain overtones they may wish to highlight. Similarly, a remedy is a treatment to cure a disease or ailment that employs certain spices, vegetables. Home remedies may or may not have medicinal properties that treat or cure the disease or ailment in question, in the written record, the study of herbs dates back 5,000 years to the ancient Sumerians, who described well-established medicinal uses for plants. In Ancient Egyptian medicine, the Ebers papyrus from c.1552 BC records a list of folk remedies, the Old Testament also mentions herb use and cultivation in regards to Kashrut. Many herbs and minerals used in Ayurveda were described by ancient Indian herbalists such as Charaka, Latin manuscripts of De Materia Medica were combined with a Latin herbal by Apuleius Platonicus and were incorporated into the Anglo-Saxon codex Cotton Vitellius C. III. These early Greek and Roman compilations became the backbone of European medical theory and were translated by the Persian Avicenna, the Persian Rhazes, Arabic indigenous medicine developed from the conflict between the magic-based medicine of the Bedouins and the Arabic translations of the Hellenic and Ayurvedic medical traditions. Spanish indigenous medicine was influenced by the Arabs from 711 to 1492, islamic physicians and Muslim botanists such as al-Dinawari and Ibn al-Baitar significantly expanded on the earlier knowledge of materia medica. The most famous Persian medical treatise was Avicennas The Canon of Medicine, the Canon was translated into Latin in the 12th century and remained a medical authority in Europe until the 17th century. The Unani system of medicine is also based on the Canon. Translations of the early Roman-Greek compilations were made into German by Hieronymus Bock whose herbal, the book was translated into Dutch as Pemptades by Rembert Dodoens, and from Dutch into English by Carolus Clusius, published by Henry Lyte in 1578 as A Nievve Herball. This became John Gerards Herball or General Hiftorie of Plantes, each new work was a compilation of existing texts with new additions. Womens folk knowledge existed in undocumented parallel with these texts, forty-four drugs, diluents, flavouring agents and emollients mentioned by Dioscorides are still listed in the official pharmacopoeias of Europe. The Puritans took Gerards work to the United States where it influenced American Indigenous medicine, both Hernandez and Ximenez fitted Aztec ethnomedicinal information into the European concepts of disease such as warm, cold, and moist, but it is not clear that the Aztecs used these categories
6.
Alternative medicine
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Alternative therapies or diagnoses are not part of medicine or science-based healthcare systems. Contrary to popular belief, significant expense is paid to test alternative medicine, almost none show any effect beyond that of false treatment. Alternative treatments are neither the same as experimental medicine, nor traditional medicine — although the latter, Alternative medicine has grown in popularity and is used by a significant percentage of the population in many countries. While it has rebranded itself, from quackery to complementary or integrative medicine—it promotes essentially the same practices. Newer proponents often suggest alternative medicine be used together with medical treatment. Despite being illegal to market alternative therapies for treatment in most of the developed world. Alternative therapies are based on religion, tradition, superstition, belief in supernatural energies, pseudoscience, errors in reasoning, propaganda, fraud. Regulation and licensing of alternative medicine and health care providers varies between and within countries, Alternative medicine is criticized for being based on misleading statements, quackery, pseudoscience, antiscience, fraud, or poor scientific methodology. Promoting alternative medicine has been called dangerous and unethical, testing alternative medicine that has no scientific basis has been called a waste of scarce research resources. It has been suggested that the very idea of any alternative treatment that works is paradoxical. Practitioners of complementary medicine usually discuss and advise patients as to available alternative therapies, patients often express interest in mind-body complementary therapies because they offer a non-drug approach to treating some health conditions. In addition to the underpinnings of the popularity of alternative medicine. One of the most critical is the placebo effect—a well-established observation in medicine, CAMs popularity may be related to other factors that Edzard Ernst mentioned in an interview in The Independent, Why is it so popular, then. Ernst blames the providers, customers and the doctors whose neglect, there are 40 million websites and 39.9 million tell lies, sometimes outrageous lies. They mislead cancer patients, who are encouraged not only to pay their last penny, at the same time, people are gullible. It needs gullibility for the industry to succeed and it doesnt make me popular with the public, but its the truth. An analysis of the reasons why this is so points towards the relationship as a key factor. Providers of CAM tend to build better therapeutic relationships than mainstream healthcare professionals, in turn, this implies that much of the popularity of CAM is a poignant criticism of the failure of mainstream healthcare
7.
Evidence
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Evidence, broadly construed, is anything presented in support of an assertion. This support may be strong or weak, the strongest type of evidence is that which provides direct proof of the truth of an assertion. At the other extreme is evidence that is consistent with an assertion but does not rule out other, contradictory assertions. In law, rules of evidence govern the types of evidence that are admissible in a legal proceeding, types of legal evidence include testimony, documentary evidence, and physical evidence. The parts of a case which are not in controversy are known, in general. Beyond any facts that are undisputed, a judge or jury is usually tasked with being a trier of fact for the issues of a case. Evidence and rules are used to decide questions of fact that are disputed, Evidence in certain cases must be more compelling than in other situations, which drastically affects the quality and quantity of evidence necessary to decide a case. In philosophy, the study of evidence is tied to epistemology. The burden of proof is the obligation of a party in an argument or dispute to provide sufficient evidence to shift the other partys or a third partys belief from their initial position, the burden of proof must be fulfilled by both establishing confirming evidence and negating oppositional evidence. Conclusions drawn from evidence may be subject to criticism based on a failure to fulfill the burden of proof. Two principal considerations are, On whom does the burden of proof rest, to what degree of certitude must the assertion be supported. The latter question depends on the nature of the point under contention, in a criminal trial in the United States, for example, the prosecution carries the burden of proof since the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Similarly, in most civil procedures, the plaintiff carries the burden of proof, other legal standards of proof include reasonable suspicion, probable cause, prima facie evidence, credible evidence, substantial evidence, and clear and convincing evidence. In a philosophical debate, there is a burden of proof on the party asserting a claim. Each party in a debate will therefore carry the burden of proof for any assertion they make in the argument, although some assertions may be granted by the other party without further evidence. If the debate is set up as a resolution to be supported by one side and refuted by another, in scientific research evidence is accumulated through observations of phenomena that occur in the natural world, or which are created as experiments in a laboratory or other controlled conditions. Scientific evidence usually goes towards supporting or rejecting a hypothesis, one must always remember that the burden of proof is on the person making a contentious claim. Within science, this translates to the burden resting on presenters of a paper and this paper is placed before a panel of judges where the presenter must defend the thesis against all challenges
8.
Scientific method
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The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning, experiments need to be designed to test hypotheses. The most important part of the method is the experiment. The scientific method is a process, which usually begins with observations about the natural world. Human beings are naturally inquisitive, so often come up with questions about things they see or hear. The best hypotheses lead to predictions that can be tested in various ways, in general, the strongest tests of hypotheses come from carefully controlled and replicated experiments that gather empirical data. Depending on how well the tests match the predictions, the hypothesis may require refinement. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported a theory may be developed. Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features are shared in common between them. The overall process of the method involves making conjectures, deriving predictions from them as logical consequences. A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while formulating the question, the hypothesis might be very specific or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments, the purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations agree with or conflict with the predictions derived from a hypothesis. Experiments can take anywhere from a college lab to CERNs Large Hadron Collider. There are difficulties in a statement of method, however. Though the scientific method is presented as a fixed sequence of steps. Not all steps take place in scientific inquiry, and are not always in the same order. Some philosophers and scientists have argued there is no scientific method, such as Lee Smolin. Nola and Sankey remark that For some, the idea of a theory of scientific method is yester-years debate
9.
Pharmaceutical drug
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A pharmaceutical drug is a drug used to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease. Drug therapy is an important part of the field and relies on the science of pharmacology for continual advancement. Drugs are classified in various ways, one of the key divisions is by level of control, which distinguishes prescription drugs from over-the-counter drugs. Other ways to classify medicines are by mode of action, route of administration, biological system affected, an elaborate and widely used classification system is the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System. The World Health Organization keeps a list of essential medicines, Drug discovery and drug development are complex and expensive endeavors undertaken by pharmaceutical companies, academic scientists, and governments. Governments generally regulate what drugs can be marketed, how drugs are marketed, controversies have arisen over drug pricing and disposal of used drugs. In the US, a drug is, A substance recognized by an official pharmacopoeia or formulary, a substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease. A substance intended to affect the structure or any function of the body, a substance intended for use as a component of a medicine but not a device or a component, part or accessory of a device. Pharmaceutical or a drug is classified on the basis of their origin, Drug from natural origin, Herbal or plant or mineral origin, some drug substances are of marine origin. Drug from chemical as well as origin, Derived from partial herbal and partial chemical synthesis Chemical. Drug derived from animal origin, For example, hormones, Drug derived from microbial origin, Antibiotics Drug derived by biotechnology genetic-engineering, hybridoma technique for example Drug derived from radioactive substances. An elaborate and widely used system is the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System. The World Health Organization keeps a list of essential medicines, the main classes of painkillers are NSAIDs, opioids and Local anesthetics. For consciousness Some anesthetics include Benzodiazepines and Barbiturates, the main categories of drugs for musculoskeletal disorders are, NSAIDs, muscle relaxants, neuromuscular drugs, and anticholinesterases. Euthanasia is not permitted by law in countries, and consequently medicines will not be licensed for this use in those countries. Administration is the process by which a patient takes a medicine, there are three major categories of drug administration, enteral, parenteral, and other. It can be performed in various forms such as pills, tablets. There are many variations in the routes of administration, including intravenous and they can be administered all at once as a bolus, at frequent intervals or continuously
10.
Phytotherapy
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Herbalism is the study of botany and use of plants intended for medicinal purposes or for supplementing a diet. Plants have been the basis for medical treatments through much of human history, modern medicine recognizes herbalism as a form of alternative medicine, as the practice of herbalism is not strictly based on evidence gathered using the scientific method. Modern medicine makes use of many plant-derived compounds as the basis for evidence-based pharmaceutical drugs, the scope of herbal medicine is sometimes extended to include fungal and bee products, as well as minerals, shells and certain animal parts. General practices include ancient methods of traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, practitioners of herbalism or phytotherapy are referred to as herbalists or phytotherapists. Products used in herbalism may be called herbal medicines, botanicals, natural products, herbal remedies, herbal supplements. Archaeological evidence indicates that the use of plants dates back to the Paleolithic age. Written evidence of herbal remedies dates back over 5,000 years, to the Sumerians, a number of ancient cultures wrote about plants and their medical uses in books called herbals. In ancient Egypt, herbs are mentioned in Egyptian medical papyri, depicted in tomb illustrations, or on rare occasions found in medical jars containing trace amounts of herbs. Among the oldest, lengthiest, and most important medical papyri of ancient Egypt, the Ebers Papyrus dates from about 1550 BC, the earliest known Greek herbals come from Theophrastus of Eresos who in the 4th c. B. C. wrote in Greek Historia Plantarum, from Diocles of Carystus who wrote during the 3rd century B. C, only a few fragments of these works have survived intact, but from what remains scholars have noted a large amount of overlap with the Egyptian herbals. Seeds likely used for herbalism have been found in sites of Bronze Age China dating from the Shang Dynasty. Over a hundred of the 224 drugs mentioned in the Huangdi Neijing, herbs also commonly featured in the medicine of ancient India, where the principal treatment for diseases was diet. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of the population of some Asian and African countries presently use herbal medicine for some aspect of health care. Pharmaceuticals are prohibitively expensive for most of the population, half of whom lived on less than $2 U. S. per day in 2002. In comparison, herbal medicines can be grown from seed or gathered from nature for little or no cost, many of the pharmaceuticals currently available to physicians have a long history of use as herbal remedies, including opium, aspirin, digitalis, and quinine. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 25% of modern drugs used in the United States have been derived from plants, at least 7,000 medical compounds in the modern pharmacopoeia are derived from plants. In a 2010 global survey of the most common 1000 plant-derived compounds, preclinical studies were reported for about one-half of the plant products, while 12% of the plants, although available in the Western market, had no substantial studies of their properties. Strong evidence was found that 5 were toxic or allergenic, so that their use ought to be discouraged or forbidden, according to Cancer Research UK, there is currently no strong evidence from studies in people that herbal remedies can treat, prevent or cure cancer
11.
Clinical trial
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Clinical trials are experiments or observations done in clinical research. Clinical trials generate data on safety and efficacy and they are conducted only after they have received health authority/ethics committee approval in the country where approval of the therapy is sought. These authorities are responsible for vetting the risk/benefit ratio of the trial – their approval does not mean that the therapy is safe or effective, only that the trial may be conducted. Clinical trials can vary in size and cost, and they can involve a research center or multiple centers. Clinical study design aims to ensure the validity and reproducibility of the results. Trials can be costly, depending on a number of factors. The sponsor may be an organization or a pharmaceutical, biotechnology or medical device company. Certain functions necessary to the trial, such as monitoring and lab work, may be managed by an outsourced partner, only 10 percent of all drugs started in human clinical trials become an approved drug. Some clinical trials involve healthy subjects with no pre-existing medical conditions, other clinical trials pertain to patients with specific health conditions who are willing to try an experimental treatment. When participants are healthy volunteers who receive financial incentives, the goals are different than when the participants are sick, during dosing periods, study subjects typically remain under supervision for one to 40 nights. Usually pilot experiments are conducted to gain insights for design of the trial to follow. There are two goals to testing medical treatments, to whether they work well enough, called efficacy or effectiveness. The benefits must outweigh the risks, in the US, the elderly constitute only 14 percent of the population, while they consume over one-third of drugs. Women, children and people with unrelated medical conditions are frequently excluded. For women, a reason for exclusion is the possibility of pregnancy. If the sponsor cannot obtain enough test subjects at one location investigators at other locations are recruited to join the study, during the trial, investigators recruit subjects with the predetermined characteristics, administer the treatment and collect data on the subjects health for a defined time period. The researchers send the data to the sponsor, who then analyzes the pooled data using statistical tests. Except for small, single-location trials, the design and objectives are specified in a document called a clinical trial protocol
12.
Fungi
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A fungus is any member of the group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. These organisms are classified as a kingdom, Fungi, which is separate from the other eukaryotic life kingdoms of plants, a characteristic that places fungi in a different kingdom from plants, bacteria and some protists, is chitin in their cell walls. Similar to animals, fungi are heterotrophs, they acquire their food by absorbing dissolved molecules, growth is their means of mobility, except for spores, which may travel through the air or water. Fungi are the principal decomposers in ecological systems and this fungal group is distinct from the structurally similar myxomycetes and oomycetes. The discipline of biology devoted to the study of fungi is known as mycology, in the past, mycology was regarded as a branch of botany, although it is now known fungi are genetically more closely related to animals than to plants. Abundant worldwide, most fungi are inconspicuous because of the size of their structures. Fungi include symbionts of plants, animals, or other fungi and they may become noticeable when fruiting, either as mushrooms or as molds. Fungi perform a role in the decomposition of organic matter and have fundamental roles in nutrient cycling. Since the 1940s, fungi have been used for the production of antibiotics, Fungi are also used as biological pesticides to control weeds, plant diseases and insect pests. Many species produce bioactive compounds called mycotoxins, such as alkaloids and polyketides, the fruiting structures of a few species contain psychotropic compounds and are consumed recreationally or in traditional spiritual ceremonies. Fungi can break down manufactured materials and buildings, and become significant pathogens of humans, losses of crops due to fungal diseases or food spoilage can have a large impact on human food supplies and local economies. The fungus kingdom encompasses a diversity of taxa with varied ecologies, life cycle strategies. However, little is known of the biodiversity of Kingdom Fungi. Advances in molecular genetics have opened the way for DNA analysis to be incorporated into taxonomy, phylogenetic studies published in the last decade have helped reshape the classification within Kingdom Fungi, which is divided into one subkingdom, seven phyla, and ten subphyla. The English word fungus is directly adopted from the Latin fungus, used in the writings of Horace, a group of all the fungi present in a particular area or geographic region is known as mycobiota, e. g. the mycobiota of Ireland. Like plants, fungi grow in soil and, in the case of mushrooms, form conspicuous fruit bodies. The fungi are now considered a kingdom, distinct from both plants and animals, from which they appear to have diverged around one billion years ago. Fungi have membrane-bound cytoplasmic organelles such as mitochondria, sterol-containing membranes and they have a characteristic range of soluble carbohydrates and storage compounds, including sugar alcohols, disaccharides, and polysaccharides
13.
Bee
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Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their role in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the European honey bee, for producing honey and beeswax. Bees are a lineage within the superfamily Apoidea, presently considered as a clade Anthophila. There are nearly 20,000 known species of bees in seven to nine recognized families, though many are undescribed and they are found on every continent except Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. Some species including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees live socially in colonies, Bees are adapted for feeding on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for larvae, Bee pollination is important both ecologically and commercially, the decline in wild bees has increased the value of pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees. The most common bees in the Northern Hemisphere are the Halictidae, or sweat bees, vertebrate predators of bees include birds such as bee-eaters, insect predators include beewolves and dragonflies. Human beekeeping or apiculture has been practised for millennia, since at least the times of Ancient Egypt, apart from honey and pollination, honey bees produce beeswax, royal jelly and propolis. Bees have appeared in mythology and folklore, again since ancient times, and they feature in works of literature as varied as Virgils Georgics, Beatrix Potters The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse, yeatss poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Bee larvae are included in the Javanese dish botok tawon, where they are steamed with shredded coconut. The ancestors of bees were wasps in the family Crabronidae, which were predators of other insects. The switch from insect prey to pollen may have resulted from the consumption of insects which were flower visitors and were partially covered with pollen when they were fed to the wasp larvae. This same evolutionary scenario may have occurred within the vespoid wasps, until recently, the oldest non-compression bee fossil had been found in New Jersey amber, Cretotrigona prisca of Cretaceous age, a corbiculate bee. A bee fossil from the early Cretaceous, Melittosphex burmensis, is considered an extinct lineage of pollen-collecting Apoidea sister to the modern bees. Derived features of its place it clearly within the bees. By the Eocene there was considerable diversity among eusocial bee lineages. The highly eusocial corbiculate Apidae appeared roughly 87 Mya, and the Allodapini around 53 Mya, the Colletidae appear as fossils only from the late Oligocene to early Miocene. The Melittidae are known from Palaeomacropis eocenicus in the Early Eocene, the Megachilidae are known from trace fossils from the Middle Eocene. The Andrenidae are known from the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, around 34 Mya, the Halictidae first appear in the Early Eocene with species found in amber
14.
Dietary mineral
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In the context of nutrition, a mineral is a chemical element required as an essential nutrient by organisms to perform functions necessary for life. Minerals originate in the earth and cannot be made by living organisms, most of the minerals in a human diet come from eating plants and animals or from drinking water. As a group, minerals are one of the four groups of essential nutrients, the others of which are vitamins, essential fatty acids, the five major minerals in the human body are calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, and magnesium. All of the elements in a human body are called trace elements. The trace elements that have a specific function in the human body are iron, cobalt, copper, zinc, manganese, molybdenum, iodine. Most chemical elements that are ingested by organisms are in the form of simple compounds, plants absorb dissolved elements in soils, which are subsequently ingested by the herbivores that eat them, and the elements move up the food chain. Larger organisms may also consume soil or use mineral resources, such as salt licks, one element, cobalt, is available for use by animals only after having been processed into complex molecules by bacteria. Minerals are used by animals and microorganisms for the process of mineralizing structures, called biomineralization, used to construct bones, seashells, eggshells, exoskeletons and mollusc shells. At least twenty chemical elements are known to be required to support human biochemical processes by serving structural and functional roles as well as electrolytes, however, as many as twenty-nine elements in total are suggested to be used by mammals, as inferred by biochemical and uptake studies. Phosphorus makes up about 1% of a body weight. The last four major minerals make up only about 0. 85% of the weight of the body, together these eleven chemical elements make up 99. 85% of the body. Minerals are present in a human beings blood at certain mass. The figure below presents the concentrations of each of the elements discussed in this article. Depending on the concentrations, some are in part of the picture. The figure includes the values of other constituents of blood such as hormones. In the figure, minerals are color highlighted in purple, dietitians may recommend that minerals are best supplied by ingesting specific foods rich with the chemical element of interest. The elements may be present in the food or added to the food. The dietary focus on chemical elements derives from an interest in supporting the biochemical reactions of metabolism with the elemental components
15.
Animal shell
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An exoskeleton is the external skeleton that supports and protects an animals body, in contrast to the internal skeleton of, for example, a human. In usage, some of the kinds of exoskeletons are known as shells. Examples of animals with exoskeletons include insects such as grasshoppers and cockroaches, the shells of certain sponges and the various groups of shelled molluscs, including those of snails, clams, tusk shells, chitons and nautilus, are also exoskeletons. Some animals, such as the tortoise, have both an endoskeleton and an exoskeleton, exoskeletons have a role in defense from pests and predators, support, and in providing an attachment framework for musculature. Exoskeletons contain chitin, the addition of calcium carbonate makes them harder and stronger, ingrowths of the arthropod exoskeleton known as apodemes serve as attachment sites for muscles. These structures are composed of chitin, and are six times as strong. Similar to tendons, apodemes can stretch to store energy for jumping. Many different species produce exoskeletons, which are composed of a range of materials, bone, cartilage, or dentine is used in the Ostracoderm fish and turtles. Chitin forms the exoskeleton in arthropods including insects, arachnids such as spiders, crustaceans such as crabs and lobsters, calcium carbonates constitute the shells of molluscs, brachiopods, and some tube-building polychaete worms. Silica forms the exoskeleton in the microscopic diatoms and radiolaria, one species of mollusc, the scaly-foot gastropod, even makes use of the iron sulfides greigite and pyrite. Some organisms, such as some foraminifera, agglutinate exoskeletons by sticking grains of sand, contrary to a common misconception, echinoderms do not possess an exoskeleton, as their test is always contained within a layer of living tissue. Exoskeletons have evolved many times,18 lineages evolved calcified exoskeletons alone. Further, other lineages have produced tough outer coatings analogous to an exoskeleton and this coating is constructed from bone in the armadillo, and hair in the pangolin. The armor of reptiles like turtles and Ankylosaurs is constructed of bone, crocodiles have bony scutes, since exoskeletons are rigid, they present some limits to growth. Organisms with open shells can grow by adding new material to the aperture of their shell, as is the case in snails, bivalves, a true exoskeleton, like that found in arthropods, must be shed when it is outgrown. A new exoskeleton is produced beneath the old one, as the old one is shed, the new skeleton is soft and pliable. The animal will pump itself up to expand the new shell to maximal size, when the shell has set, the empty space inside the new skeleton can be filled up as the animal eats. Failure to shed the exoskeleton once outgrown can result in the animal being suffocated within its own shell and this is the mechanism behind some insect pesticides, such as Azadirachtin
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Traditional Chinese medicine
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It is primarily used as a complementary alternative medicine approach. TCM is widely used in China and is becoming prevalent in Europe. One of the tenets of TCM holds that the bodys vital energy circulates through channels, called meridians. Concepts of the body and of disease used in TCM reflect its ancient origins and its emphasis on dynamic processes over material structure, scientific investigation has not found histological or physiological evidence for traditional Chinese concepts such as qi, meridians, and acupuncture points. The TCM theory and practice are not based upon scientific knowledge, the effectiveness of Chinese herbal medicine remains poorly researched and documented. There are concerns over a number of toxic plants, animal parts. There are also concerns over illegal trade and transport of endangered species including rhinoceroses and tigers, a review of cost-effectiveness research for TCM found that studies had low levels of evidence, but so far have not shown benefit outcomes. Pharmaceutical research has explored the potential for creating new drugs from traditional remedies, proponents propose that research has so far missed key features of the art of TCM, such as unknown interactions between various ingredients and complex interactive biological systems. The doctrines of Chinese medicine are rooted in such as the Yellow Emperors Inner Canon and the Treatise on Cold Damage, as well as in cosmological notions such as yin-yang. Starting in the 1950s, these precepts were standardized in the Peoples Republic of China, including attempts to integrate them with modern notions of anatomy, in the 1950s, the Chinese government promoted a systematized form of TCM. TCMs view of the body places little emphasis on anatomical structures, while health is perceived as the harmonious interaction of these entities and the outside world, disease is interpreted as a disharmony in interaction. Traces of therapeutic activities in China date from the Shang dynasty, which Shang elites usually attributed to curses sent by their ancestors. There is no evidence that the Shang nobility used herbal remedies, according to a 2006 overview, the Documentation of Chinese materia medica dates back to around 1,100 BC when only dozens of drugs were first described. By the end of the 16th century, the number of drugs documented had reached close to 1,900, and by the end of the last century, published records of CMM had reached 12,800 drugs. Stone and bone found in ancient tombs led Joseph Needham to speculate that acupuncture might have been carried out in the Shang dynasty. The earliest evidence for acupuncture in this sense dates to the second or first century BC, the Yellow Emperors Inner Canon, the oldest received work of Chinese medical theory, was compiled around the first century BC on the basis of shorter texts from different medical lineages. It was also one of the first books in which the doctrines of Yinyang. The Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders and Miscellaneous Illnesses was collated by Zhang Zhongjing sometime between 196 and 220 CE, at the end of the Han dynasty
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Ayurveda
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Ayurveda, or Ayurveda medicine, is a system of medicine with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent. Globalized and modernized practices derived from Ayurveda traditions are a type of complementary or alternative medicine, in the Western world, Ayurveda therapies and practices have been integrated in general wellness applications and as well in some cases in medical use. The main classical Ayurveda texts begin with accounts of the transmission of knowledge from the Gods to sages. In Sushruta Samhita, Sushruta wrote that Dhanvantari, Hindu god of Ayurveda, incarnated himself as a king of Varanasi and taught medicine to a group of physicians, Ayurveda therapies have varied and evolved over more than two millennia. Therapies are typically based on complex compounds, minerals and metal substances. Ancient Ayurveda texts also taught surgical techniques, including rhinoplasty, kidney stone extractions, sutures, other researchers consider it a protoscience, or trans-science system instead. Close to 21% of Ayurveda U. S. and Indian-manufactured patent medicines sold through the Internet were found to contain levels of heavy metals, specifically lead, mercury. The public health implications of such metallic contaminants in India are unknown, some scholars assert that Ayurveda originated in prehistoric times, and that some of the concepts of Ayurveda have existed from the time of the Indus Valley Civilization or even earlier. Humoral balance is emphasized, and suppressing natural urges is considered unhealthy, Ayurveda names three elemental substances, the doshas, and states that a balance of the doshas results in health, while imbalance results in disease. Ayurveda has eight components, which are derived from classical Sanskrit literature. Ayurveda practitioners had developed various medicinal preparations and surgical procedures by the medieval period, the earliest classical Sanskrit works on Ayurveda describe medical science as being divided into eight components. This characterization of the art, the medicine that has eight components, is first found in the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata. The central theoretical ideas of Ayurveda developed in the mid-first millennium BCE, balance is emphasized, and suppressing natural urges is considered unhealthy and claimed to lead to illness. For example, to suppress sneezing is said to give rise to shoulder pain. However, people are also cautioned to stay within the limits of reasonable balance, for example, emphasis is placed on moderation of food intake, sleep, and sexual intercourse. Ayurveda names seven basic tissues, which are plasma, blood, muscles, fat, bone, marrow, like the medicine of classical antiquity, Ayurveda has historically divided bodily substances into five classical elements eliminates toxic elements from the body. Panchakarma includes Vamana, Virechana, Basti, Nasya and Raktamokshana and it is preceded by Poorvakarma as a preparatory step, and is followed by Paschatkarma and Peyadikarma. Based on the World Health Assembly resolution on traditional medicine, the WHO has established a traditional medicine strategy, the first previous global strategy was published in 2002 and dealt especially with herbal medicines
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Natural health product
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A recent survey showed that 73% of Canadians consume NHP on a regular basis. NHP are obtainable without a prescription and are required to be safe to be used as an over-the-counter product, Natural health care products are currently regulated under the Natural Health Product Regulations, under the authority of the Food and Drugs Act. Under the regulations, all natural health products require a Natural Product Number, analogous to the Drug Identification Numbers used to identify, NHPs are safe to consume and generally have less side effects than traditional drug medications. However, NHP are not risk free and have potential for some risks and these may come about from manufacturing problems, misrepresented or unproven claims on the label, unexpected side effects, or interaction with other medication/NHPs also being consumed. It has been reported that 12% of Canadians have experienced unwanted side effects due to the consumption of NHPs and it is recommended that you do your research and consult a health care professional if you are concerned with the potential risks
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History of herbalism
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The history of herbalism is closely tied with the history of medicine from prehistoric times up until the development of the germ theory of disease in the 19th century. Modern medicine from the 19th century to today has been based on evidence gathered using the scientific method, evidence-based use of pharmaceutical drugs, often derived from medicinal plants, has largely replaced herbal treatments in modern health care. However, many continue to employ various forms of traditional or alternative medicine. These systems often have a significant herbal component, the use of plants as medicines predates written human history. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans were using medicinal plants during the Paleolithic, plant samples gathered from prehistoric burial sites have been thought to support the claim that Paleolithic peoples had knowledge of herbal medicine. For instance, a 60, 000-year-old Neanderthal burial site, Shanidar IV, medicinal herbs were found in the personal effects of Ötzi the Iceman, whose body was frozen in the Ötztal Alps for more than 5,000 years. These herbs appear to have used to treat the parasites found in his intestines. In Mesopotamia, the study of herbs dates back over 5,000 years to the Sumerians. Ancient Egyptian texts are of particular interest due to the language and translation controversies that accompany texts from this era, while physical documents are scarce, texts such as the Papyrus Ebers serve to illuminate and relieve some of the conjecture surrounding ancient herbal practices. Treatments were mainly aimed at ridding the patient of the most prevalent symptoms because the symptoms were largely regarded as the disease itself, herbs used by Egyptian healers were mostly indigenous in origin, although some were imported from other regions like Lebanon. Other than papyri, evidence of medicine has also been found in tomb illustrations or jars containing traces of herbs. In India, Ayurveda medicine has used many such as turmeric possibly as early as 4,000 BC. Earliest Sanskrit writings such as the Rig Veda, and Atharva Veda are some of the earliest available documents detailing the medical knowledge that formed the basis of the Ayurveda system. Many other herbs and minerals used in Ayurveda were later described by ancient Indian herbalists such as Charaka, the Sushruta Samhita attributed to Sushruta in the 6th century BC describes 700 medicinal plants,64 preparations from mineral sources, and 57 preparations based on animal sources. By 2,000 BC, Chinese started prescribing to herbal medicines, in China, seeds likely used for herbalism have also been found in the archaeological sites of Bronze Age China dating from the Shang Dynasty. The mythological Chinese emperor Shennong is said to have written the first Chinese pharmacopoeia, the Shennong Ben Cao Jing lists 365 medicinal plants and their uses - including Ephedra, hemp, and chaulmoogra. Succeeding generations augmented on the Shennong Bencao Jing, as in the Yaoxing Lun, the Hippocratic Corpus serves as a collection of texts that are associated with the Father of Western Medicine, Hippocrates of Kos. Though the actual authorship of some of these texts is disputed, each reflects the ideals put forth by Hippocrates
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Materia medica
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Materia medica is a Latin medical term for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing. The term derives from the title of a work by the Ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the 1st century AD, De materia medica, On Medical Material. The term materia medica was used from the period of the Roman Empire until the 20th century, the earliest known writing about medicine was a 110-page Egyptian papyrus. It was supposedly written by the god Thoth in about 16 BC, the Ebers papyrus is an ancient recipe book dated to approximately 1552 BC. It contains a mixture of magic and medicine with invocations to banish disease, the most famous Egyptian physician was Imhotep, who lived in Memphis around 2500 B. C. Imhotep’s materia medica consisted of procedures for treating head and torso injuries, tending of wounds, in India, the Ayurveda is traditional medicine that emphasizes plant-based treatments, hygiene, and balance in the body’s state of being. Indian materia medica included knowledge of plants, where they grow in all season, methods for storage and it also included directions for making juice from vegetables, dried powders from herb, cold infusions and extracts. The earliest Chinese manual of materia medica, the Shennong Bencao Jing, was compiled in the 1st century AD during the Han dynasty and it lists some 365 medicines, of which 252 are herbs. Earlier literature included lists of prescriptions for specific ailments, exemplified by the Recipes for Fifty-Two Ailments found in the Mawangdui tomb, succeeding generations augmented the Shennong Bencao Jing, as in the Yaoxing Lun, a 7th-century Tang Dynasty treatise on herbal medicine. In Greece, Hippocrates was a philosopher known as the Father of Medicine. He founded a school of medicine focused on treating the causes of disease rather than its symptoms. Disease was dictated by natural laws and therefore could be treated through close observation of symptoms and his treatises, Aphorisms and Prognostics, discuss 265 drugs, the importance of diet and external treatments for diseases. Theophrastus was a disciple of Aristotle and a philosopher of natural history and he wrote a treatise entitled Historia Plantarium about 300 B. C. It was the first attempt to organize and classify plants, plant lore and it provided physicians with a rough taxonomy of plants and details of medicinal herbs and herbal concoctions. Galen was a philosopher, physician, pharmacist and prolific medical writer and he compiled an extensive record of the medical knowledge of his day and added his own observations. He wrote on the structure of organs, but not their uses, the pulse and its association with respiration, the arteries and the movement of blood, and the uses of theriacs. In treatises such as On Theriac to Piso, On Theriac to Pamphilius and his work was rediscovered in the 15th century and became the authority on medicine and healing for the next two centuries. His medicine was based on the regulation of the four humors, the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides, of Anazarbus in Asia Minor, wrote a five-volume treatise concerning medical matters, entitled Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς in Greek or De Materia Medica in Latin
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Paleolithic
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The Paleolithic is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools and covers roughly 95% of human technological prehistory. It extends from the earliest known use of tools, probably by Homo habilis initially,2.6 million years ago. The Paleolithic era is followed by the Mesolithic, the date of the Paleolithic–Mesolithic boundary may vary by locality as much as several thousand years. During the Paleolithic period, humans grouped together in small societies such as bands, the Paleolithic is characterized by the use of knapped stone tools, although at the time humans also used wood and bone tools. Other organic commodities were adapted for use as tools, including leather and vegetable fibers, however, due to their nature, surviving artifacts of the Paleolithic era are known as paleoliths. About 50,000 years ago, there was a increase in the diversity of artifacts. For the first time in Africa, bone artifacts and the first art appear in the archaeological record, the first evidence of human fishing is also noted, from artifacts in places such as Blombos cave in South Africa. The new technology generated an explosion of modern humans which is believed to have led to the extinction of the Neanderthals. Humankind gradually evolved from members of the genus Homo—such as Homo habilis. The climate during the Paleolithic consisted of a set of glacial and interglacial periods in which the climate periodically fluctuated between warm and cool temperatures, by c. 50,000 – c. 40,000 BP, the first humans set foot in Australia. By c. 45,000 BP, humans lived at 61°N latitude in Europe, by c. 30,000 BP, Japan was reached, and by c. 27,000 BP humans were present in Siberia, above the Arctic Circle. At the end of the Upper Paleolithic, a group of humans crossed Beringia, the term Paleolithic was coined by archaeologist John Lubbock in 1865. It derives from Greek, παλαιός, palaios, old, and λίθος, lithos, stone, human evolution is the part of biological evolution concerning the emergence of anatomically modern humans as a distinct species. The Paleolithic Period coincides almost exactly with the Pleistocene epoch of geologic time and this epoch experienced important geographic and climatic changes that affected human societies. During the preceding Pliocene, continents had continued to drift from possibly as far as 250 km from their present locations to positions only 70 km from their current location. South America became linked to North America through the Isthmus of Panama, most of Central America formed during the Pliocene to connect the continents of North and South America, allowing fauna from these continents to leave their native habitats and colonize new areas. Africas collision with Asia created the Mediterranean Sea, cutting off the remnants of the Tethys Ocean, climates during the Pliocene became cooler and drier, and seasonal, similar to modern climates. The formation of an Arctic ice cap around 3 million years ago is signaled by a shift in oxygen isotope ratios and ice-rafted cobbles in the North Atlantic
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Sumer
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Living along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, Sumerian farmers were able to grow an abundance of grain and other crops, the surplus of which enabled them to settle in one place. Proto-writing in the dates back to c.3000 BC. The earliest texts come from the cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr and date back to 3300 BC, modern historians have suggested that Sumer was first permanently settled between c.5500 and 4000 BC by a West Asian people who spoke the Sumerian language, an agglutinative language isolate. These conjectured, prehistoric people are now called proto-Euphrateans or Ubaidians, some scholars contest the idea of a Proto-Euphratean language or one substrate language. Reliable historical records begin much later, there are none in Sumer of any kind that have dated before Enmebaragesi. Juris Zarins believes the Sumerians lived along the coast of Eastern Arabia, todays Persian Gulf region, Sumerian civilization took form in the Uruk period, continuing into the Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic periods. During the 3rd millennium BC, a cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians, who spoke a language isolate, and Akkadian-speakers, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a scale, to syntactic, morphological. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the 3rd millennium BC as a Sprachbund, Sumer was conquered by the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire around 2270 BC, but Sumerian continued as a sacred language. Native Sumerian rule re-emerged for about a century in the Neo-Sumerian Empire or Third Dynasty of Ur approximately 2100-2000 BC, the term Sumerian is the common name given to the ancient non-Semitic-speaking inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Sumer, by the East Semitic-speaking Akkadians. The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg ga, phonetically /uŋ saŋ gi ga/, literally meaning the black-headed people, the Akkadian word Shumer may represent the geographical name in dialect, but the phonological development leading to the Akkadian term šumerû is uncertain. Hebrew Shinar, Egyptian Sngr, and Hittite Šanhar, all referring to southern Mesopotamia, in the late 4th millennium BC, Sumer was divided into many independent city-states, which were divided by canals and boundary stones. Each was centered on a dedicated to the particular patron god or goddess of the city. The Sumerian city-states rose to power during the prehistoric Ubaid and Uruk periods, classical Sumer ends with the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 23rd century BC. Following the Gutian period, there is a brief Sumerian Renaissance in the 21st century BC, the Amorite dynasty of Isin persisted until c.1700 BC, when Mesopotamia was united under Babylonian rule. The Sumerians were eventually absorbed into the Akkadian population, 2500–2334 BC Akkadian Empire period, c. 2218–2047 BC Ur III period, c, 2047–1940 BC The Ubaid period is marked by a distinctive style of fine quality painted pottery which spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. It appears that this culture was derived from the Samarran culture from northern Mesopotamia and it is not known whether or not these were the actual Sumerians who are identified with the later Uruk culture
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Herbal
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Herbals were often illustrated to assist plant identification. Herbals were among the first literature produced in Ancient Egypt, China, India, herbals were also among the first books to be printed in both China and Europe. In Western Europe herbals flourished for two following the introduction of moveable type. In the late 17th century, the rise of modern chemistry, herbals have seen a modest revival in the western world since the last decades of the 20th century, as herbalism and related disciplines became popular forms of alternative medicine. Much of the found in printed herbals arose out of traditional medicine. Before the advent of printing, herbals were produced as manuscripts, early handwritten herbals were often illustrated with paintings and drawings. Like other manuscript books, herbals were published through repeated copying by hand, in the process of making a copy, the copyist would often translate, expand, adapt, or reorder the content. Most of the original herbals have been lost, many have survived only as later copies, as printing became available, it was promptly used to publish herbals, the first printed matter being known as incunabula. In Europe, the first printed herbal with woodcut illustrations, the Puch der Natur of Konrad of Megenberg, metal-engraved plates were first used in about 1580. China is renowned for its traditional herbal medicines that date back thousands of years and it survives as a copy made c.500 CE and describes about 365 herbs. In 1406 Ming dynasty prince Zhu Xiao published the Jiuhuang Bencao illustrated herbal for famine foods and it contained high quality woodcuts and descriptions of 414 species of plants of which 276 were described for the first time, the book pre-dating the first European printed book by 69 years. Other herbals include Bencao Fahui in 1450 by Xu Yong and Bencao Gangmu of Li Shizhen in 1590. Traditional herbal medicine of India, known as Ayurveda, possibly back to the second millennium BCE tracing its origins to the holy Hindu Vedas and, in particular. One authentic compilation of teachings is by the surgeon Sushruta, available in a treatise called Sushruta Samhita and this contains 184 chapters and description of 1120 illnesses,700 medicinal plants,64 preparations from mineral sources and 57 preparations based on animal sources. Other early works of Ayurveda include the Charaka Samhita, attributed to Charaka and this tradition, however is mostly oral. The earliest surviving written material which contains the works of Sushruta is the Bower Manuscript—dated to the 4th century CE, an illustrated herbal published in Mexico in 1552, Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, is written in the Aztec Nauhuatl language by a native physician, Martín Cruz. In 1570 Francisco Hernández was sent from Spain to study the natural resources of New Spain, here he drew on indigenous sources, including the extensive botanical gardens that had been established by the Aztecs, to record c.1200 plants in his Rerum Medicarum of 1615. Nicolás Monardes’ Dos Libros contains the first published illustration of tobacco, by about 2000 BCE, medical papyri in ancient Egypt included medical prescriptions based on plant matter and made reference to the herbalists combination of medicines and magic for healing
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Egyptian medical papyri
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Egyptian medical papyri are ancient Egyptian texts written on papyrus which permit a glimpse at medical procedures and practices in ancient Egypt. The papyri give details on disease, diagnosis, and remedies of disease, which include herbal remedies, surgery and it is thought there were more medical papyri, but many have been lost due to grave robbing. The largest study of the papyri to date has been undertaken by Berlin University and was titled Medizin der alten Ägypter. Early Egyptian medicine was based mostly on a mixture of magic, most commonly cured by use of amulets or magical spells, the illnesses were thought to be caused by spiteful behavior or actions. Afterwards, doctors performed various medical treatments if necessary, the instructions for these medical rituals were later inscribed on papyrus scrolls by the priests performing the actions. Dated to circa 1800 BCE, the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus is the oldest known medical text and it was found at El-Lahun by Flinders Petrie in 1889, first translated by F. Ll. Griffith in 1893, and published in The Petrie Papyri, Hieratic Papyri from Kahun, the papyrus contains 35 separate paragraphs relating to womens health, such as gynaecological diseases, fertility, pregnancy, and contraception. The Ramesseum Papyri – These consist of 17 individual papyri that were found in the temple of the Ramesseum. They concentrate on the eyes, gynecology, paediatrics, muscles, dated to circa 1600 BCE, the Edwin Smith Papyrus is the only surviving copy of part of an Ancient Egyptian textbook on trauma surgery. The papyrus takes its name from the Egyptian archaeologist Edwin Smith, the most detailed and sophisticated of the extant medical papyri, it is also the worlds oldest surgical text. Written in the script of the ancient Egyptian language, it is thought to be based on material from a thousand years earlier. The document consists of 22 pages,48 cases of trauma are examined, each with a description of the physical examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. The entire translation is available online, the Ebers Papyrus was also purchased by Edwin Smith in 1862. It takes its name from Georg Ebers who purchased the papyrus in 1872, the papyrus dates to around 1550BC and covers 110 pages, making it the lengthiest of the medical papyri. The papyrus covers many different topics including, dermatology, digestive diseases, traumatic diseases, dentistry and it makes many references to treating ailments with spells or religious techniques. One of the most important findings of this papyrus are the references to migraines which shows the dates back to this time. The Hearst Papyrus was offered in 1901 to the Hearst Expedition in Egypt and it is dated around 2000 BC, though doubts subsist about its authenticity. It concentrated on treatments for problems dealing with the system, blood, hair
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Ebers Papyrus
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The Ebers Papyrus, also known as Papyrus Ebers, is an Egyptian medical papyrus of herbal knowledge dating to c.1550 BC. Among the oldest and most important medical papyri of ancient Egypt and it is currently kept at the library of the University of Leipzig, in Germany. The papyrus was written in about 1500 BC, but it is believed to have copied from earlier texts. The Ebers Papyrus is a 110-page scroll, which is about 20 meters long, the Brugsch Papyrus provides parallel passages to the Ebers Papyrus, helping to clarify certain passages of the latter. The Ebers Papyrus is written in hieratic Egyptian writing and contains the most voluminous record of ancient Egyptian medicine known, the scroll contains some 700 magical formulas and remedies. It contains many incantations meant to turn away disease-causing demons and there is evidence of a long tradition of empiricism. The papyrus contains a treatise on the heart and it notes that the heart is the center of the blood supply, with vessels attached for every member of the body. The Egyptians seem to have known little about the kidneys and made the heart the meeting point of a number of vessels which carried all the fluids of the body—blood, tears, urine, mental disorders are detailed in a chapter of the papyrus called the Book of Hearts. Disorders such as depression and dementia are covered, the descriptions of these disorders suggest that Egyptians conceived of mental and physical diseases in much the same way. Examples of remedies in the Ebers Papyrus include, Cancer Recounting a tumor against the god Xenus, birth control To prevent conception, smear a paste of dates, acacia, and honey to wool and apply as a pessary. Diabetes mellitus Drink a mixture including elderberry, asit plant fibers, milk, beer-swill, cucumber flowers, dracunculiasis Wrap the emerging end of the worm around a stick and slowly pull it out. One of the more common remedies described in the papyrus is ochre and it is prescribed for intestinal and eye complaints. Yellow ochre is also described as a remedy for urological complaints, like the Edwin Smith Papyrus, the Ebers Papyrus came into the possession of Edwin Smith in 1862. The source of the papyrus is unknown, but it was said to have found between the legs of a mummy in the El-Assasif district of the Theban necropolis. The Papyrus was purchased in 1872 by the German Egyptologist and novelist Georg Ebers, in 1875, Ebers published a facsimile with an English-Latin vocabulary and introduction, but it was not translated until 1890, by H. Joachim. Ebers retired from his chair of Egyptology at Leipzig on a pension, an English translation of the papyrus was published by Paul Ghalioungui. The papyrus was published and translated by different researchers, history of medicine Medical literature Pommerening, Tanja. Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur Beiheft 10, relevant pharmaceutical and medical knowledge, an abstract, Phillips-Universitat, Marburg, 8-11-2004
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Ancient Greece
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Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th-9th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and this was followed by the period of Classical Greece, an era that began with the Greco-Persian Wars, lasting from the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Due to the conquests by Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Hellenistic civilization flourished from Central Asia to the end of the Mediterranean Sea. Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a influence on ancient Rome. For this reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the culture which provided the foundation of modern Western culture and is considered the cradle of Western civilization. Classical Antiquity in the Mediterranean region is considered to have begun in the 8th century BC. Classical Antiquity in Greece is preceded by the Greek Dark Ages and this period is succeeded, around the 8th century BC, by the Orientalizing Period during which a strong influence of Syro-Hittite, Jewish, Assyrian, Phoenician and Egyptian cultures becomes apparent. The end of the Dark Ages is also dated to 776 BC. The Archaic period gives way to the Classical period around 500 BC, Ancient Periods Astronomical year numbering Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details The history of Greece during Classical Antiquity may be subdivided into five major periods. The earliest of these is the Archaic period, in which artists made larger free-standing sculptures in stiff, the Archaic period is often taken to end with the overthrow of the last tyrant of Athens and the start of Athenian Democracy in 508 BC. It was followed by the Classical period, characterized by a style which was considered by observers to be exemplary, i. e. classical, as shown in the Parthenon. This period saw the Greco-Persian Wars and the Rise of Macedon, following the Classical period was the Hellenistic period, during which Greek culture and power expanded into the Near and Middle East. This period begins with the death of Alexander and ends with the Roman conquest, Herodotus is widely known as the father of history, his Histories are eponymous of the entire field. Herodotus was succeeded by authors such as Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Plato, most of these authors were either Athenian or pro-Athenian, which is why far more is known about the history and politics of Athens than those of many other cities. Their scope is limited by a focus on political, military and diplomatic history, ignoring economic. In the 8th century BC, Greece began to emerge from the Dark Ages which followed the fall of the Mycenaean civilization, literacy had been lost and Mycenaean script forgotten, but the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, modifying it to create the Greek alphabet. The Lelantine War is the earliest documented war of the ancient Greek period and it was fought between the important poleis of Chalcis and Eretria over the fertile Lelantine plain of Euboea. Both cities seem to have suffered a decline as result of the long war, a mercantile class arose in the first half of the 7th century BC, shown by the introduction of coinage in about 680 BC
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Theophrastus
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Theophrastus, a Greek native of Eresos in Lesbos, was the successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic school. He came to Athens at an age and initially studied in Platos school. After Platos death, he attached himself to Aristotle who took to Theophrastus his writings, when Aristotle fled Athens, Theophrastus took over as at the Lyceum. Theophrastus presided over the Peripatetic school for years, during which time the school flourished greatly. He is often considered the father of botany for his works on plants, after his death, the Athenians honoured him with a public funeral. His successor as head of the school was Strato of Lampsacus, the interests of Theophrastus were wide ranging, extending from biology and physics to ethics and metaphysics. His two surviving works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, were an important influence on Renaissance science. There are also surviving works On Moral Characters, On Sensation, On Stones, in philosophy, he studied grammar and language and continued Aristotles work on logic. He also regarded space as the arrangement and position of bodies, time as an accident of motion. In ethics, he regarded happiness as depending on external influences as well as on virtue and he was a native of Eresos in Lesbos. His given name was Tyrtamus, but he became known by the nickname Theophrastus, given to him, it is said. After receiving instruction in philosophy in Lesbos from one Alcippus, he moved to Athens and he became friends with Aristotle, and when Plato died Theophrastus may have joined Aristotle in his self-imposed exile from Athens. When Aristotle moved to Mytilene on Lesbos in 345/4, it is likely that he did so at the urging of Theophrastus. It seems that it was on Lesbos that Aristotle and Theophrastus began their research into science, with Aristotle studying animals. Theophrastus probably accompanied Aristotle to Macedonia when Aristotle was appointed tutor to Alexander the Great in 343/2, around 335 BC, Theophrastus moved with Aristotle to Athens where Aristotle began teaching in the Lyceum. Aristotle in his will made him guardian of his children, including Nicomachus with whom he was close, Aristotle likewise bequeathed to him his library and the originals of his works, and designated him as his successor at the Lyceum. Eudemus of Rhodes also had claims to this position. Theophrastus presided over the Peripatetic school for years, and died at the age of eighty-five according to Diogenes
28.
Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
29.
Historia Plantarum (Theophrastus)
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Theophrastus looks at plant structure, reproduction and growth, the varieties of plant around the world, wood, wild and cultivated plants, and their uses. Book 9 in particular, on the uses of plants, is one of the first herbals, describing juices, gums and resins extracted from plants. Historia Plantarum was written some time between c.350 BC and c.287 BC in ten volumes, of which nine survive. In the book, Theophrastus described plants by their uses, and attempted a biological classification based on how plants reproduced and he continually revised the manuscript, and it remained in an unfinished state on his death. Historia Plantarum was first translated into Latin by Theodore Gaza, the translation was published in 1483, Johannes Bodaeus published a frequently cited folio edition in Amsterdam in 1644, complete with commentaries and woodcut illustrations. The first English translation was made by Sir Arthur Hort and published in 1916, the Enquiry into Plants is in Horts parallel text a book of some 400 pages of original Greek, consisting of about 100,000 words. It was originally organised into ten books, of which nine survive, though it is possible the text represents all the material. Along with his other surviving work, On the Causes of Plants. On the strength of these books, the first scientific inquiries into plants and one of the first systems of plant classification, Linnaeus called Theophrastus the father of botany. However, he went beyond Aristotle in describing seeds as parts of the plant, Aristotle, French argues, Theophrastus made use of a variety of sources for the book, including Diocles on drugs and medicinal plants. Theophrastus claims to have gathered information from drug-sellers and root-cutters, Plants described include poppy, hemlock, wild lettuce, and mandrake. The surviving texts are the notes that Theophrastus used in teaching and he referred to earlier books in the Lyceum library including Democritus, sometimes preserving fragments of books otherwise lost. He mentions about 500 species of plant, the Enquiry into Plants was first translated into Latin by Theodore Gaza by 1454, circulated in manuscript, and then published at Treviso in 1483. In its original Greek it first appeared from the press of Aldus Manutius at Venice, 1495–98, wimmer identified two manuscripts of first quality, the Codex Urbinas in the Vatican Library, which was not made known to Johann Gottlob Schneider, who with H. F. Link made the first modern edition, Leipzig 1818–1821. A good and often-cited edition is that of Johannes Bodaeus, published in Amsterdam in 1644 and this folio edition has the Greek and Latin texts printed in parallel, along with commentaries on the text by Julius Caesar Scaliger and Robert Constantine, and woodcut illustrations of plants. Sir William Thiselton-Dyer described the commentary as botanically monumental and fundamental, the first translation into English, with an introduction and parallel Greek and English texts, was made by Sir Arthur Hort. Enquiry into Plants classifies plants according to how they reproduce, their localities, their sizes, and their practical uses including as foods, juices, and herbs
30.
Bronze Age
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The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Copper-tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before trading in bronze began in the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, with the Chalcolithic serving as a transition, although the Iron Age generally followed the Bronze Age, in some areas, the Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic. Bronze Age cultures differed in their development of the first writing, according to archaeological evidence, cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt developed the earliest viable writing systems. The overall period is characterized by use of bronze, though the place and time of the introduction. Human-made tin bronze technology requires set production techniques, tin must be mined and smelted separately, then added to molten copper to make bronze alloy. The Bronze Age was a time of use of metals. The dating of the foil has been disputed, the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East began with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC. Societies in the region laid the foundations for astronomy and mathematics, the usual tripartite division into an Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age is not used. Instead, a division based on art-historical and historical characteristics is more common. The cities of the Ancient Near East housed several tens of thousands of people, ur in the Middle Bronze Age and Babylon in the Late Bronze Age similarly had large populations. The earliest mention of Babylonia appears on a tablet from the reign of Sargon of Akkad in the 23rd century BC, the Amorite dynasty established the city-state of Babylon in the 19th century BC. Over 100 years later, it took over the other city-states. Babylonia adopted the written Semitic Akkadian language for official use, by that time, the Sumerian language was no longer spoken, but was still in religious use. Elam was an ancient civilization located to the east of Mesopotamia, in the Old Elamite period, Elam consisted of kingdoms on the Iranian plateau, centered in Anshan, and from the mid-2nd millennium BC, it was centered in Susa in the Khuzestan lowlands. Its culture played a role in the Gutian Empire and especially during the Achaemenid dynasty that succeeded it
31.
Shang Dynasty
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The Shang dynasty or Yin dynasty, according to traditional historiography, ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium BC, succeeding the Xia dynasty and followed by the Zhou dynasty. The classic account of the Shang comes from such as the Book of Documents, Bamboo Annals. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project dated them from c.1600 to 1046 BC, the Shang dynasty is the earliest dynasty of traditional Chinese history supported by archaeological evidence. Tens of thousands of bronze, jade, stone, bone, the Anyang site has yielded the earliest known body of Chinese writing, mostly divinations inscribed on oracle bones – turtle shells, ox scapulae, or other bones. More than 20,000 were discovered in the scientific excavations during the 1920s and 1930s. The inscriptions provide critical insight into many topics from the politics, economy, many events concerning the Shang dynasty are mentioned in various Chinese classics, including the Book of Documents, the Mencius and the Zuo Zhuan. Working from all the documents, the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian assembled a sequential account of the Shang dynasty as part of his Records of the Grand Historian. His history describes some events in detail, while in other cases only the name of a king is given, a closely related, but slightly different, account is given by the Bamboo Annals. The Annals were interred in 296 BC, but the text has a complex history, the name Yīn is used by Sima Qian for the dynasty, and in the current text version of the Bamboo Annals for both the dynasty and its final capital. It has been a name for the Shang throughout history. Since the Records of Emperors and Kings by Huangfu Mi, it has often used specifically to describe the later half of the Shang dynasty. In Japan and Korea, the Shang are still referred to almost exclusively as the Yin dynasty, however it seems to have been a Zhou name for the earlier dynasty. The word does not appear in the bones, which refer to the state as Shāng. It also does not appear in securely-dated Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, xie is said to have helped Yu the Great to control the Great Flood and for his service to have been granted a place called Shang as a fief. Sima Qian relates that the dynasty itself was founded 13 generations later, when Xies descendant Tang overthrew the impious and cruel final Xia ruler in the Battle of Mingtiao. The Records recount events from the reigns of Tang, Tai Jia, Tai Wu, Pan Geng, Wu Ding, Wu Yi and the final king Di Xin. According to the Records, the Shang moved their capital five times, Di Xin, the last Shang king, is said to have committed suicide after his army was defeated by Wu of Zhou. Legends say that his army and his equipped slaves betrayed him by joining the Zhou rebels in the decisive Battle of Muye, according to the Yi Zhou Shu and Mencius the battle was very bloody
32.
Huangdi Neijing
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The work is composed of two texts each of eighty-one chapters or treatises in a question-and-answer format between the mythical Yellow Emperor and six of his equally legendary ministers. The first text, the Suwen, also known as Basic Questions, covers the foundation of Chinese Medicine. The second and generally less referred-to text, the Lingshu, discusses acupuncture therapy in great detail, collectively, these two texts are known as the Neijing or Huangdi Neijing. In practice, however, the title Neijing often refers only to the more influential Suwen, two other texts also carried the prefix Huangdi Neijing in their titles, the Mingtang 明堂 and the Taisu 太素, both of which have survived only partially. The earliest mention of the Huangdi Neijing was in the chapter of the Hanshu 漢書. The Yellow Emperors Inner Classic is the most important ancient text in Chinese medicine as well as a book of Daoist theory. The text is structured as a dialogue between the Yellow Emperor and one of his ministers or physicians, most commonly Qíbó, one possible reason for using this device was for the authors to avoid attribution and blame. The Neijing departs from the old shamanistic beliefs that disease was caused by demonic influences, instead the natural effects of diet, lifestyle, emotions, environment, and age are the reason diseases develop. According to the Neijing, the universe is composed of forces and principles, such as Yin and yang, Qi. These forces can be understood via rational means and man can stay in balance or return to balance, man is a microcosm that mirrors the larger macrocosm. The principles of yin and yang, the five elements, the factors of wind, damp, hot and cold. The work is dated by scholars to between the late Warring States period and the Han dynasty. The dominant role the theories of yin/yang and the five elements play in the physiology and pathology indicates that these theories are not older than about 320 BCE. Historian of science Nathan Sivin is of the opinion that the Suwen and he is also of the opinion that no available translation is reliable. The work subsequently underwent major editorial changes, lu Fu, a fourteenth-century literary critic, was of the opinion that the Suwen was compiled by several authors over a long period. Its contents were then brought together by Confucian scholars in the Han Dynasty era, because of this, they consider the Neijing to have been compiled after the Mawangdui texts. In 762 CE, Wang Bing finished his revision of the Suwen after labouring for twelve years, Wang Bing collected the various versions and fragments of the Suwen and reorganized it into the present eighty-one chapters format. Treatises seventy-two and seventy-three are lost and only the titles are known, originally his changes were all done in red ink, but later copyists incorporated some of his additions into the main text
33.
De Materia Medica
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De Materia Medica is a pharmacopoeia of herbs and the medicines that can be obtained from them. The five-volume work describes many drugs known to be effective, including aconite, aloes, colocynth, colchicum, henbane, opium, in all, about 600 plants are covered, along with some animals and mineral substances, and around 1000 medicines made from them. The work was written between 50 and 70 AD by Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the Roman army. It was widely read for more than 1,500 years until supplanted by revised herbals in the Renaissance, De Materia Medica was circulated as illustrated manuscripts, copied by hand, in Greek, Latin and Arabic throughout the mediaeval period. From the sixteenth century on, Dioscorides text was translated into Italian, German, Spanish, and French, and in 1655 into English. It formed the basis for herbals in these languages by men such as Leonhart Fuchs, Valerius Cordus, Lobelius, Rembert Dodoens, Carolus Clusius, John Gerard, gradually such herbals included more and more direct observations, supplementing and eventually supplanting the classical text. Sir Arthur Hill saw a monk on Mount Athos still using a copy of Dioscorides to identify plants in 1934. Between 50 and 70 AD, Dioscorides wrote a book in his native Greek, Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς Peri hules iatrikēs. It became the reference work on pharmacology across Europe and the Middle East for over 1500 years. In contrast to classical authors, De Materia Medica was not rediscovered in the Renaissance, because it never left circulation, indeed. In the medieval period, De Materia Medica was circulated in Latin, Greek, in the Renaissance from 1478 onwards, it was printed in Italian, German, Spanish, and French as well. In 1655, John Goodyer made an English translation from a printed version, while being reproduced in manuscript form through the centuries, the text was often supplemented with commentary and minor additions from Arabic and Indian sources. Several illustrated manuscripts of De Materia Medica survive, densely illustrated Arabic copies survive from the 12th and 13th centuries. De Materia Medica is the historical source of information about the medicines used by the Greeks, Romans. The work also records the Dacian names for plants, which otherwise would have been lost. The work presents about 600 plants in all, along with animals and mineral substances. This meant that people attempted to force a match between the plants they knew and those described by Dioscorides, leading to what could be catastrophic results. After this brief description, he moves at once into pharmacology, saying that they sleep, other uses are to treat inflammation and erysipela
34.
Pedanius Dioscorides
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He was employed as a medic in the Roman army. A native of Anazarbus, Cilicia, Asia Minor, Dioscorides practised medicine in Rome during the reign of the emperor Nero. He was a surgeon with the Roman army, which gave him the opportunity to travel extensively, the name Pedanius is Roman, suggesting that an aristocrat of that name sponsored him to become a Roman citizen. He dedicated his books to Laecanius Arius, a medical practitioner of Tarsus in Cilicia. In the medieval period, De Materia Medica was circulated in Greek, as well as Latin, while being reproduced in manuscript form through the centuries, it was often supplemented with commentary and minor additions from Arabic and Indian sources. A number of illustrated manuscripts of De Materia Medica survive, the most famous of these is the lavishly illustrated Vienna Dioscurides, produced in Constantinople in 512/513 AD. Densely illustrated Arabic copies survive from the 12th and 13th centuries, De Materia Medica is the prime historical source of information about the medicines used by the Greeks, Romans, and other cultures of antiquity. The work also records the Dacian and Thracian names for some plants, the Dioscorea genus of plants, which includes the yam, was named after him by Linnaeus. De Materia Medica, Being an Herbal with many other materials, Englished by Tess Anne Osbaldeston, year 2000. De Materia Medica, translated by Lily Y. Beck, Englished by John Goodyer A. D.1655, edited by R. T. De Materia medica, libri V Eiusdem de Venenis Libri duo, interprete Iano Antonio Saraceno Lugdunaeo, Medico, translated by Janus Antonius Saracenus. In Voltaires Candide, the characters injuries received at the hands of the Bulgarian army. Pedanius Dioscorides in, Health and Well Being, A Medieval Guide, hamilton, J. S. Scribonius Largus on the medical profession. Bulletin of the history of medicine, lazris, J. Stavros, V. Limage paradigmatique, des Schémas anatomiques dAristote au De materia medica de Dioscoride. Riddle, John M. Dioscorides on pharmacy and medicine, the Arabic materia medica of Dioscorides. Québec, Canada, Les Éditions du sphinx, the Preface of Dioscorides Materia Medica, introduction, translation, and commentary. Transactions & studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Dioscurides Neapolitanus, Codex ex Vindobonensis Graecus 1. Medic, Catalogue des textes en ligne, Dioscoride/Dioscodirides, Pedanius, bibliothèque interuniversitaire de médecine et dodontologie, Université Paris Descartes
35.
Anazarbus
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Anazarbus was an ancient Cilician city and bishopric, which remains a Latin Catholic Titular See. It was situated in Anatolia in modern Turkey, in the present Çukurova about 15 km west of the stream of the present Ceyhan River. A lofty isolated ridge formed its acropolis, under the early Roman empire the place was known as Caesarea, and was the Metropolis of Late Roman province Cilicia Secunda. It was the home of the poet Oppian and it had been rebuilt by Harun al-Rashid in 796, refortified at great expense by the Hamdanid Sayf al-Dawla and again destroyed in 962 by Nikephoros II Phokas. In late 1097 or early 1098 it was captured by the armies of the First Crusade and was incorporated into Bohemond’s Principality of Antioch, the Crusaders are probably responsible for the construction of an impressive donjon atop the center of the outcrop. The site briefly exchanged hands between the Greeks and Armenians, until it was part of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Within the fortress are two Armenian chapels and the magnificent three-aisle church built by T‛oros I to celebrate his conquests, the church was once surrounded by a continuous, well-executed dedicatory inscription in Armenian. The Mamluk Empire of Egypt finally destroyed the city in 1374, the present wall of the lower city is of late construction. It encloses a mass of ruins conspicuous in which are a triumphal arch. A stadium and a theatre lie outside the walls to the south, the remains of the acropolis fortifications are very interesting, including roads and ditches hewn in the rock. There are no notable structures in the upper town, for picturesqueness the site is not equaled in Cilicia, and it is worthwhile to trace the three fine aqueducts to their sources. A necropolis on the escarpment to the south of the wall can also be seen complete with signs of illegal modern excavations. A visit in December 2002 showed that the three mentioned above have been nearly completely destroyed. Only small, isolated sections are left standing with the largest portion lying in a pile of rubble that stretches the length of where the aqueducts once stood, a powerful earthquake that struck the area in 1945 is thought to be responsible for the destruction. A modest Turkish farming village lies to the southwest of the ancient city, a small outdoor museum with some of the artifacts collected in the area can be viewed for a small fee. Also nearby are some beautiful mosaics discovered in a farmers field, inquire at the museum for a viewing. Anazarbus/Anavarsa was one of a chain of Armenian fortifications stretching through Cilicia, the castle of Sis lies to the north while Tumlu Castle and Yilankale are to the south, and the fortresses of Amouda and Sarvandikar are to the east. Anazarbus was the capital and so also from 553 the metropolitan see of the Late Roman province of Cilicia Secunda, a 6th century Notitia Episcopatuum indicates that it had as suffragan sees Epiphania, Alexandria Minor, Irenopolis, Flavias, Castabala and Aegeae
36.
Cilicia
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In antiquity, Cilicia was the south coastal region of Asia Minor and existed as a political entity from Hittite times into the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia during the late Byzantine Empire. Extending inland from the southeastern coast of modern Turkey, Cilicia is due north and northeast of the island of Cyprus, Cilicia extended along the Mediterranean coast east from Pamphylia, to the Nur Mountains, which separated it from Syria. North and east of Cilicia lie the rugged Taurus Mountains that separate it from the central plateau of Anatolia. Ancient Cilicia was naturally divided into Cilicia Trachaea and Cilicia Pedias by the Limonlu River, salamis, the city on the east coast of Cyprus, was included in its administrative jurisdiction. Homer mentions the people of Mopsus, identified as Cilices, as from the Troad in the northernwesternmost part of Anatolia, the English spelling Cilicia is the same as the Latin, as it was transliterated directly from the Greek form Κιλικία. The palatalization of c occurring in the west in later Vulgar Latin accounts for its pronunciation in English. The district is watered by the Calycadnus and was covered in ancient times by forests that supplied timber to Phoenicia, many of its high places were fortified. The plain is watered by the three rivers, the Cydnus, the Sarus and the Pyramus, each of which brings down much silt from the deforested interior. The Sarus now enters the sea almost due south of Tarsus, but there are indications that at one period it joined the Pyramus. Through the rich plain of Issus ran the great highway that linked east and west, on which stood the cities of Tarsus on the Cydnus, Adana on the Sarus, Cilicia was settled from the Neolithic period onwards. Dating of the ancient settlements of the region from Neolithic to Bronze Age is as follows, Aceramic/Neolithic, 8th and 7th millennia BC, Early Chalcolithic,5800 BC, Middle Chalcolithic, c. 3400 BC, and Early Bronze Age IA, 3400–3000 BC, EBA IB, 3000–2700 BC, EBA II, 2700–2400 BC, EBA III A-B, the area had been known as Kizzuwatna in the earlier Hittite era. The region was divided into two parts, Uru Adaniya, a plain, and rough Cilicia, in the mountainous west. The Cilicians appear as Hilikku in Assyrian inscriptions, and in the part of the first millennium BC were one of the four chief powers of Western Asia. Homer mentions the plain as the Aleian plain in which Bellerophon wandered, the Cilician cities unknown to Homer already bore their pre-Greek names, Tarzu, Ingira, Danuna-Adana, which retains its ancient name, Pahri, Kundu and Karatepe. After the death of Murshili around 1595 BC, Hurrians wrested control from the Hitties, the first king of free Cilicia, Išputahšu, son of Pariyawatri, was recorded as a great king in both cuneiform and Hittite hieroglyphs. Another record of Hittite origins, a treaty between Išputahšu and Telipinu, king of the Hittites, is recorded in both Hittite and Akkadian. Niqmepa, who succeeded Idrimi as king of Alalakh, went so far as to ask for help from a Hurrian rival, Shaushtatar of Mitanni, to try and reduce Cilicias power in the region
37.
World Health Organization
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The World Health Organization is a specialised agency of the United Nations that is concerned with international public health. It was established on 7 April 1948, headquartered in Geneva, the WHO is a member of the United Nations Development Group. Its predecessor, the Health Organization, was an agency of the League of Nations, the constitution of the World Health Organization had been signed by 61 countries on 22 July 1946, with the first meeting of the World Health Assembly finishing on 24 July 1948. It incorporated the Office international dhygiène publique and the League of Nations Health Organization, since its creation, it has played a leading role in the eradication of smallpox. The WHO is responsible for the World Health Report, an international publication on health, the worldwide World Health Survey. The head of WHO is Margaret Chan, the 2014/2015 proposed budget of the WHO is about US$4 billion. About US$930 million are to be provided by member states with a further US$3 billion to be from voluntary contributions, after failing to get a resolution passed on the subject, Alger Hiss, the Secretary General of the conference, recommended using a declaration to establish such an organisation. Dr. Sze and other delegates lobbied and a declaration passed calling for a conference on health. The use of the world, rather than international, emphasised the truly global nature of what the organisation was seeking to achieve. The constitution of the World Health Organization was signed by all 51 countries of the United Nations and it thus became the first specialised agency of the United Nations to which every member subscribed. Its constitution formally came into force on the first World Health Day on 7 April 1948, the first meeting of the World Health Assembly finished on 24 July 1948, having secured a budget of US$5 million for the 1949 year. Andrija Stampar was the Assemblys first president, and G. Brock Chisholm was appointed Director-General of WHO and its first priorities were to control the spread of malaria, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections, and to improve maternal and child health, nutrition and environmental hygiene. Its first legislative act was concerning the compilation of statistics on the spread. The logo of the World Health Organization features the Rod of Asclepius as a symbol for healing, in 1947 the WHO established an epidemiological information service via telex, and by 1950 a mass tuberculosis inoculation drive using the BCG vaccine was under way. In 1955, the eradication programme was launched, although it was later altered in objective. 1965 saw the first report on diabetes mellitus and the creation of the International Agency for Research on Cancer. In 1958, Viktor Zhdanov, Deputy Minister of Health for the USSR, called on the World Health Assembly to undertake an initiative to eradicate smallpox. At this point,2 million people were dying from smallpox every year, in 1966, WHO moved into its headquarters building
38.
Pharmaceuticals
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A pharmaceutical drug is a drug used to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease. Drug therapy is an important part of the field and relies on the science of pharmacology for continual advancement. Drugs are classified in various ways, one of the key divisions is by level of control, which distinguishes prescription drugs from over-the-counter drugs. Other ways to classify medicines are by mode of action, route of administration, biological system affected, an elaborate and widely used classification system is the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System. The World Health Organization keeps a list of essential medicines, Drug discovery and drug development are complex and expensive endeavors undertaken by pharmaceutical companies, academic scientists, and governments. Governments generally regulate what drugs can be marketed, how drugs are marketed, controversies have arisen over drug pricing and disposal of used drugs. In the US, a drug is, A substance recognized by an official pharmacopoeia or formulary, a substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease. A substance intended to affect the structure or any function of the body, a substance intended for use as a component of a medicine but not a device or a component, part or accessory of a device. Pharmaceutical or a drug is classified on the basis of their origin, Drug from natural origin, Herbal or plant or mineral origin, some drug substances are of marine origin. Drug from chemical as well as origin, Derived from partial herbal and partial chemical synthesis Chemical. Drug derived from animal origin, For example, hormones, Drug derived from microbial origin, Antibiotics Drug derived by biotechnology genetic-engineering, hybridoma technique for example Drug derived from radioactive substances. An elaborate and widely used system is the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System. The World Health Organization keeps a list of essential medicines, the main classes of painkillers are NSAIDs, opioids and Local anesthetics. For consciousness Some anesthetics include Benzodiazepines and Barbiturates, the main categories of drugs for musculoskeletal disorders are, NSAIDs, muscle relaxants, neuromuscular drugs, and anticholinesterases. Euthanasia is not permitted by law in countries, and consequently medicines will not be licensed for this use in those countries. Administration is the process by which a patient takes a medicine, there are three major categories of drug administration, enteral, parenteral, and other. It can be performed in various forms such as pills, tablets. There are many variations in the routes of administration, including intravenous and they can be administered all at once as a bolus, at frequent intervals or continuously
39.
Opium
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Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy. The latex also contains the closely related opiates codeine and thebaine, the word meconium historically referred to related, weaker preparations made from other parts of the opium poppy or different species of poppies. The production of opium has not changed since ancient times, through selective breeding of the Papaver somniferum plant, the content of the phenanthrene alkaloids morphine, codeine, and to a lesser extent thebaine has been greatly increased. For the illegal trade, the morphine is extracted from the opium. It is then converted to heroin which is two to four times as potent, and increases the value by two to four times, the reduced weight and bulk make it easier to smuggle. Evidence from ancient Greece indicate that opium was consumed in several ways, including inhalation of vapors, suppositories, medical poultices, Opium is mentioned in the most important medical texts of the ancient world, including the Ebers Papyrus and the writings of Dioscorides, Galen, and Avicenna. Widespread medical use of unprocessed opium continued through the American Civil War before giving way to morphine and its successors, Opium has been actively collected since prehistoric times. Though western scholars typically estimate this to be around 1500 BCE, Indian scholars maintain that the verses and the history contained in them have been orally transmitted thousands of years before. A common name for males in Afghanistan is Redey, which in Pashto means poppy and this term may be derived from the Sanskrit words rddhi and hrdya, which mean magical, a type of medicinal plant, and heart-pleasing, respectively. The upper Asian belt of Afghanistan, Pakistan, northern India, numerous finds of P. somniferum or P. setigerum from Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements have also been reported. The first known cultivation of poppies was in Mesopotamia, approximately 3400 BCE, by Sumerians, who called the plant hul gil. Tablets found at Nippur, a Sumerian spiritual center south of Baghdad, described the collection of juice in the morning. Opium production continued under the Babylonians and Egyptians, Opium was used with poison hemlock to put people quickly and painlessly to death, but it was also used in medicine. The Ebers Papyrus, c. 1500 BCE, describes a way to stop a child using grains of the poppy plant strained to a pulp. Spongia somnifera, sponges soaked in opium, were used during surgery, the Egyptians cultivated opium thebaicum in famous poppy fields around 1300 BCE. Opium was traded from Egypt by the Phoenicians and Minoans to destinations around the Mediterranean Sea, including Greece, Carthage, and Europe. By 1100 BCE, opium was cultivated on Cyprus, where surgical-quality knives were used to score the poppy pods, and opium was cultivated, traded, Opium was also mentioned after the Persian conquest of Assyria and Babylonian lands in the 6th century BCE. From the earliest finds, opium has appeared to have ritual significance, and anthropologists have speculated ancient priests may have used the drug as a proof of healing power
40.
Digitalis
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Digitalis is a genus of about 20 species of herbaceous perennials, shrubs, and biennials commonly called foxgloves. This genus was placed in the figwort family Scrophulariaceae. This genus is native to western and southwestern Europe, western and central Asia, the scientific name means finger-like and refers to the ease with which a flower of Digitalis purpurea can be fitted over a human fingertip. The flowers are produced on a spike, are tubular, and vary in colour with species, from purple to pink, white. The best-known species is the common foxglove, Digitalis purpurea and this biennial plant is often grown as an ornamental plant due to its vivid flowers which range in colour from various purple tints through various shades of light gray, and to purely white. The flowers can also possess various marks and spottings, the first year of growth of the common foxglove produces only the stem with its long, basal leaves. During the second year of the life, a long. Larvae of the pug, a moth, consume the flowers of the common foxglove for food. Other species of Lepidoptera eat the leaves, including the lesser yellow underwing, the term digitalis is also used for drug preparations that contain cardiac glycosides, particularly one called digoxin, extracted from various plants of this genus. The name is recorded in Old English as foxes glofe/glofa foxs glove, although the elements of the name are transparent, their meaning is not. Because it is not clear why the flower should be called foxglove, henry Fox Talbot proposed folks glove, where folk means fairy. Prior suggested an etymology of foxes-glew, meaning fairy music, however, neither of these suggestions account for the Old English form foxes glofa. It is commonly found on sites where the ground has been disturbed, such as recently cleared woodland, a group of medicines extracted from foxglove plants are called digitalin. It is used to increase cardiac contractility and as an agent to control the heart rate. Digitalis is hence often prescribed for patients in atrial fibrillation, especially if they have been diagnosed with heart failure. Digoxin was approved for heart failure in 1998 under current regulations by the Food and Drug Administration on the basis of prospective, randomized study and it was also approved for the control of ventricular response rate for patients with atrial fibrillation. Heart Failure Society of America guidelines for heart failure provide similar recommendations, safety concerns regarding a proposed link between digoxin therapy and increased mortality in women may be contributing to the decline in therapeutic use of digoxin. The two drugs differ in that digoxin has a hydroxyl group at the C-3 position on the B-ring
41.
Cell culture
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Cell culture is the process by which cells are grown under controlled conditions, generally outside of their natural environment. Most cells require a surface or an artificial substrate whereas others can be free floating in culture medium. The historical development and methods of culture are closely interrelated to those of tissue culture. Viral culture is related, with cells as hosts for the viruses. The laboratory technique of maintaining live cell lines separated from their original tissue source became more robust in the middle 20th century. In 1885, Wilhelm Roux removed a portion of the plate of an embryonic chicken and maintained it in a warm saline solution for several days. Ross Granville Harrison, working at Johns Hopkins Medical School and then at Yale University, published results of his experiments from 1907 to 1910, Cell culture techniques were advanced significantly in the 1940s and 1950s to support research in virology. Growing viruses in cell cultures allowed preparation of purified viruses for the manufacture of vaccines, the injectable polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk was one of the first products mass-produced using cell culture techniques. Cells can be isolated from tissues for ex vivo culture in several ways, cells can be easily purified from blood, however, only the white cells are capable of growth in culture. Mononuclear cells can be released from soft tissues by enzymatic digestion with enzymes such as collagenase, trypsin, or pronase, alternatively, pieces of tissue can be placed in growth media, and the cells that grow out are available for culture. This method is known as explant culture, cells that are cultured directly from a subject are known as primary cells. With the exception of some derived from tumors, most primary cell cultures have limited lifespan, numerous cell lines are well established as representative of particular cell types. For the majority of isolated cells, they undergo the process of senescence. Cells are grown and maintained at a temperature and gas mixture in a cell incubator. Culture conditions vary widely for each type, and variation of conditions for a particular cell type can result in different phenotypes. Aside from temperature and gas mixture, the most commonly varied factor in culture systems is the growth medium. Recipes for growth media can vary in pH, glucose concentration, growth factors, the growth factors used to supplement media are often derived from the serum of animal blood, such as fetal bovine serum, bovine calf serum, equine serum, and porcine serum. One complication of these blood-derived ingredients is the potential for contamination of the culture with viruses or prions, current practice is to minimize or eliminate the use of these ingredients wherever possible and use human platelet lysate
42.
Althaea officinalis
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Althaea officinalis is a perennial species indigenous to Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa, which is used as a medicinal plant and ornamental plant. A confection made from the root since ancient Egyptian time evolved into todays marshmallow treat, the stems, which die down in the autumn, are erect,3 to 4 ft, but can reach 6′6″, simple, or putting out only a few lateral branches. The leaves, shortly petioled, are roundish, ovate-cordate,2 to 3 in long and they are soft and velvety on both sides, due to a dense covering of stellate hairs. The flowers are shaped like those of the mallow, but are smaller and of a pale colour. The stamens are united into a tube, the anthers, kidney-shaped and one-celled, the flowers are in bloom during August and September, and are followed, as in other species of this order, by the flat, round fruit which are popularly called cheeses. The roots are perennial, thick, long and tapering, very tough and pliant, whitish yellow outside, white, the entire plant, particularly the root, abounds with a mild mucilage, which is emollient to a much greater degree than the common mallow. The generic name, Althaea, is derived from the Greek ἄλθειν, the name of the family, Malvaceae, is derived from the Latin malva, a generic name for the mallows and the source of the English common name mallow. Most of the mallows have been used as food, and are mentioned by classic writers with this connection. Mallow was an edible vegetable among the Romans, a dish of marsh mallow was one of their delicacies, prospero Alpini stated in 1592 that a plant of the mallow kind was eaten by the Egyptians. Many of the inhabitants of Syria subsisted for weeks on herbs. The leaves, flowers and the root of A. officinalis have been used in herbal medicine. This use is reflected in the name of the genus, which comes from the Greek ἄλθειν, in traditional Chinese medicine, Althaea officinalis is known as 藥蜀葵. Marshmallow is traditionally used for irritation of mucous membranes, including use as a gargle for mouth and throat ulcers, the root was used in the Middle Ages for sore throat. The root extract is used as flavoring in the making of a Middle Eastern snack called halva. The flowers and young leaves can be eaten, and are added to salads or are boiled and fried. The later French version of the recipe, called pâte de guimauve, pâte de guimauve more closely resembles contemporary commercially available marshmallows, which no longer contain Althaea officinalis. Horace mentions it in reference to his own diet, which he describes as simple, Me pascunt olivae. Chemical constituents include altheahexacosanyl lactone, 2β-hydroxycalamene and altheacoumarin glucoside, along with the known phytoconstituents lauric acid, famine food Cavero, R. Medicinal plants used for respiratory affections in Navarra and their pharmacological validation
43.
Calendula officinalis
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Calendula officinalis is a plant in the genus Calendula of the family Asteraceae. It is probably native to southern Europe, though its history of cultivation makes its precise origin unknown. It is also naturalised further north in Europe and elsewhere in warm temperate regions of the world. Calendula officinalis is a short-lived aromatic herbaceous perennial, growing to 80 cm tall, the leaves are oblong-lanceolate, 5–17 cm long, hairy on both sides, and with margins entire or occasionally waved or weakly toothed. The disc florets are tubular and hermaphrodite, and generally of a more intense orange-yellow colour than the female, tridentate, the flowers may appear all year long where conditions are suitable. The fruit is a thorny curved achene, Calendula officinalis is widely cultivated and can be grown easily in sunny locations in most kinds of soils. Although perennial, it is treated as an annual, particularly in colder regions where its winter survival is poor. Calendulas are considered by many gardening experts as among the easiest and most versatile flowers to grow in a garden, in temperate climates, seeds are sown in spring for blooms that last throughout the summer and well into the fall. In areas of limited winter freezing, seeds are sown in autumn for winter color, plants will wither in subtropical summer. Seeds will germinate freely in sunny or half-sunny locations, but plants do best if planted in locations with rich. Pot marigolds typically bloom quickly from seed in bright yellows, golds, leaves are spirally arranged, 5–18 cm long, simple, and slightly hairy. The flower heads range from yellow to deep orange, and are 3–7 cm across. Most cultivars have a spicy aroma and it is recommended to deadhead the plants regularly to maintain even blossom production. Numerous cultivars have been selected for variation in the flowers, from yellow to orange-red. Examples include Alpha, Jane Harmony, Sun Glow, Lemon, Orange Prince, Indian Prince, Pink Surprise, variegata is a cultivar with yellow variegated leaves. Calendulas are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including Cabbage moth, Gothic moth, Large yellow underwing and they are often used to add color to salads or added to dishes as a garnish and in lieu of saffron. The leaves are edible but are not palatable. They have a history of use as a potherb and in salads, flowers were used in ancient Greek, Roman, Middle Eastern, and Indian cultures as a medicinal herb as well as a dye for fabrics, foods, and cosmetics
44.
Centella asiatica
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Centella asiatica, commonly known as centella, is a small, herbaceous, frost-tender perennial plant in the flowering plant family Apiaceae, subfamily Mackinlayoideae. It is native to wetlands in Asia and it is also known as the Asiatic pennywort or Indian pennywort in English, among various other names in other languages. Centella grows in swampy areas. The stems are slender, creeping stolons, green to reddish-green in color and it has long-stalked, green, rounded apices which have smooth texture with palmately netted veins. The leaves are borne on petioles, around 2 cm. The rootstock consists of rhizomes, growing vertically down and they are creamish in color and covered with root hairs. The flowers are white or pinkish to red in color, born in small, each flower is partly enclosed in two green bracts. The hermaphrodite flowers are minute in size, less than 3 mm, each flower bears five stamens and two styles. The fruit are densely reticulate, distinguishing it from species of Hydrocotyle which have smooth, the crop matures in three months, and the whole plant, including the roots, is harvested manually. Centella asiatica is indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, because the plant is aquatic, it is especially sensitive to biological and chemical pollutants in the water, which may be absorbed into the plant. It can be cultivated in drier soils as long as they are watered regularly enough, in Myanmar cuisine, raw pennywort is used as the main constituent in a salad made also with onions, crushed peanuts, bean powder and seasoned with lime juice and fish sauce. Centella is used as a green in Sri Lankan cuisine, being the most predominant of all locally available leafy greens. The adjective gotu in Sinhalese, is translated as a conical shape. It is most often prepared as malluma, an accompaniment to rice and curry, and goes especially well with vegetarian dishes, such as dhal. It is considered nutritious and is often the very first leafy green a weaning toddler is introduced to. The Centella fruit-bearing structures are discarded from the gotu kola malluma due to their bitter taste. A variation of the nutritious porridge known as kola kenda is made with gotu kola by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka. Gotu kola kenda is made with well-boiled red rice with some extra liquid, coconut milk first extract, the porridge is accompanied with jaggery for sweetness
45.
Echinacea purpurea
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Echinacea purpurea is a North American species of flowering plant in the sunflower family. It is native to eastern North America and present to some extent in the wild in much of the eastern, southeastern and midwestern United States as well as in the Canadian Province of Ontario and it is most common in the Ozarks and in the Mississippi/Ohio Valley. Echinacea purpurea is a perennial up to 120 cm tall by 25 cm wide at maturity. Depending on the climate, it blooms throughout spring to late summer and its cone-shaped flowering heads are usually, but not always, purple in the wild. Its individual flowers within the head are hermaphroditic, having both male and female organs in each flower. It is pollinated by butterflies and bees and its habitats include dry open woods, prairies and barrens, as well as in cultivated beds. Although the plant prefers loamy or sandy, well-drained soils, it is affected by the soils pH. Echinacea purpurea is grown as an ornamental plant, and numerous cultivars have been developed for flower quality. The plant grows in sun or light shade and it thrives in either dry or moist soil and can tolerate drought once established. The cultivar Ruby Giant following has gained the Royal Horticultural Societys Award of Garden Merit, Echinacea purpurea can be propagated either vegetatively or from seeds. Useful vegetative techniques include division, root cuttings, and basal cuttings, clumps can be divided, or broken into smaller bunches, which is normally done in the spring or autumn. Cuttings made from roots that are pencil-sized will develop into plants when started in autumn or early winter. Cuttings of basal shoots in the spring may be rooted when treated with rooting hormones, seed germination occurs best with daily temperature fluctuations or after stratification, which help to end dormancy. Seeds may be started indoors in advance of the season or outdoors after the growing season has started. Echinacea purpurea contains multiple substances, such as polysaccharides, caffeic acid derivatives, alkylamides, the plant is important economically, to the pharmaceutical trade. It is purported that all parts of the purple coneflower stimulate the immune system, well-controlled trials studying these uses are limited and low in quality. Study results are mixed on whether preparations including Echinacea can be useful for upper respiratory tract infections including colds, side effects include gastrointestinal effects and allergic reactions, including rashes, increased asthma, and life-threatening anaphylaxis. Abouelella A, Shahein YE, Tawfik SS, Zahran AM, phytotherapeutic effects of Echinacea purpurea in gamma-irradiated mice
46.
Passiflora incarnata
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Passiflora incarnata, commonly known as maypop, purple passionflower, true passionflower, wild apricot, and wild passion vine, is a fast-growing perennial vine with climbing or trailing stems. A member of the passionflower genus Passiflora, the maypop has large, intricate flowers with prominent styles, one of the hardiest species of passionflower, it is a common wildflower in the southern United States. The Cherokee in the Tennessee area called it ocoee, the Ocoee River and valley are named after this plant and this, and other passionflowers are the exclusive larval host plants for the Gulf fritillary and non-exclusive for the variegated fritillary butterflies. The stems can be smooth or pubescent, they are long and trailing, possessing many tendrils, leaves are alternate and palmately 3-lobed and occasionally 5-lobed, measuring 6–15 centimetres. They have two glands at the base of the blade on the petiole. They exhibit a white and purple corona, a structure of fine appendages between the petals and stamens, the large flower is typically arranged in a ring above the petals and sepals. They are pollinated by insects such as bumblebees and carpenter bees, the flower normally blooms in July. The fleshy fruit, also referred to as a maypop, is an oval yellowish berry about the size of a hen egg, it is green at first, but then becomes orange as it matures. As with other passifloras, it is the food of a number of butterfly species, including the zebra longwing. In many cases its fruit is popular with wildlife. The egg-shaped green fruits may pop when stepped on and this phenomenon gives the P. incarnata its common name. The maypop occurs in thickets, disturbed areas, near riverbanks, and near unmowed pastures, roadsides and it thrives in areas with lots of available sunlight. It is not found in areas beneath a forest canopy. The maypop in the wild is a vine and native to the Southeast extending into the central portion of the US reaching Illinois, Indiana. The plants grow in sun and need direct sunlight for at least half of the day. The best soils for P. incarnata are well-drained but the plants tolerate occasionally wet, the plants have a high drought tolerance. P. incarnata can be planted all the year in zone 7–11, the space between two plants is 36–60 inches. One to two years are necessary before they begin bearing, each flower has a very short life
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. PMID 26281720. doi:10.1016/j.biotechadv.2015.08.001.
