Drug Discovery: A History (Sneader, Walter) (original) (raw)
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Journal of Psychedelic Studies
Las drogas en la Prehistoria: Evidencias arqueológicas del consume de sustancias psicoactivas en Europa Bellaterra, Barcelona, 2006, 531 pp. including introduction, glossary, and bibliography Paperback ISBN: 84-7290-323-0 Doce's book (translated title Drugs in Prehistory: Archaeological Evidence of the Use of Psychoactive Substances in Europe) has broader considerations going wellbeyond Europe. Doce notes that the contemporary societal debates about the use of psychoactive substances can be informed by the wide variety of botanical substances used as psychoactives across human history and prehistory. Doce notes the difficulty in determining whether substances are strictly psychedelic, as opposed to psychoactive, but also argues that the context easily leads to the conclusion that uses were entheogenic. Doce argues the importance of using these contemporary and recent historical sources of information as a model for interpreting the past in other regions. Consideration of ritual drug use in better-known areas provides an ethnographic analogy for interpreting the artifacts found in the European past and a model for the typical activities of the huntergather, agricultural, and high civilization societies. Chapter 1 addresses ethnographic evidence for psychoactive substance use in the Americas, whereas Chapter 2 addresses evidence from the Near and Middle East, as well as India and China. Chapter 3 reviews evidence for the use of psychoactives in the Classic world of Greece and Rome. This introductory material sets the stage for the next three chapters, which access evidence regarding psychoactive plant use in the Neolithic period, Bronze Age, and Iron age, respectively, constituting the heart of Doce's book. These are followed by a short "Final Considerations" and botanical catalogue of potential psychoactive plants of the Old World. The ethnographic analogies from the Americas regarding psychoactive plant use show that they were viewed as a mechanism for enhancing connection with the spiritual realms and are hence entheogens. Diverse Amerindian traditions engaged in the entheogenic use of Lophophora williamsii (peyote), Anadenanthera and Virola snuffs, and Banisteriopsis brews known as ayahuasca, tobacco, and other substances. Doce provides a detailed ethnohistorical background to some of these principal cultural traditions of entheogen use in the Americas, exemplified in the Tiwanaku. The highly significant artifacts from the prehistoric cultures of the Americas attest to the central role of these practices in religion of these societies. The significant placement of snuff inhalation tools in graves attests to their centrality to conceptions of an afterlife. The abundant deposits of hollow bone tubes, tubes, spatulas, and other implements obtained This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited, a link to the CC License is provided, and changesif anyare indicated.
Historical Contribution of Pharmaceutics to Botany and Pharmacognosy Development
Materia Socio Medica, 2017
Introduction: Pharmacy and medicine belong to the oldest human activities, so the development of these sciences is closely related to the socioeconomic , cultural and religious opportunities of the nations within which they have been developing. Goals: To present the historical influence of pharmacy on the development of the human being from its very beginning; To present the historical link between pharmaceutical and medical activity, as well as early development of independent pharmaceutical activity; To present the historical influence of pharmacists on the development of botany and pharmacognosy and to present the historical influence of the first written herbarium and incunabula on the development of pharmacognosy. Material and Methods: The article has a descriptive character, and represents a systematic review of the literature dealing with this topic. Results: The roots of pharmacy started to the very beginning of human civilization, when people collected various medicinal herbs and try to alleviate their health problems, pain and suffering. The scientific foundations of the pharmacy were set up in the antique period by the books of Dioskurides and Galen, and its further development continued in the mid-century, at the beginning by rewriting famous parts of ancient literature, and later by writing new discoveries (the base of this development was represented by South Italy) so that in 1240, for the first time in history, came the separation of doctors and pharmacists, and at the beginning of the 13th century the opening of the first pharmacy. Conclusion: The effort to maintain knowledge of medicinal herbs and its practical application has led to the writing of a large number of recipes books, the forerunners of today's pharmacopeia, while the aspiration to classify medicinal herbs, and the desire to present medicinal herbs to ordinary people, has led to a large number of herbaria, making the knowledge and descriptions of plants available to many, not just the nobility. Descriptions of plants in herbaria and later in incunabula lead to the development of pharmacognosy, and to the opening of the first Department for pharmacognosy, 1545 in Padua.
Drugs and Drug Lore in the Time of Theophrastus
is famous for his pioneering manual of botany, the Inquiry into Plants (usually cited by its Latin title, Historia plantarum), set down about 300 B.C. This is the first fundamental ordering of botany (pot-herbs, wild species, some trees, vines, many other 'classes' of plants) by means of morphology, as well as a description of those plants considered foods, drugs, and other species which had special powers or properties that were portions of a very ancient folklore. A brilliant student of Aristotle of Stagira in Chalcidice, Theophrastus had been a participant in his teacher's early dissections and vivisections of animals, and one discerns distinctive zoological and medical interests by both student and mentor as they collected "facts" to make up the various books of "inquiries" (Grk. historiai). Book IX of the Inquiry into Plants is especially rich in the details of folkloristic information provided to the Peripatetics by a professional class of rhizotomoi ("rootcutters") who searched out medicinal plants, sorted them, and sold them in the agorai of the various poleis in Greece, and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world of the 4 th century B.C. The rootcutters were the "professionals" who knew drugs as derived from plants and plant parts, so that a rough classification of plant parts as drugs (pharmaka) entered formal levels of Greek pharmacology through the writings of Theophrastus, who succeeded to the Headship of the Lyceum when Aristotle died in 322 B.C.
Creating time capsules for colonial botanical drugs in the early modern Low Countries
2015
DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:
Drugs from nature, 2022
For forty years, the author has combined his fascination with non-Western and ancient cultures with his professional expertise as a clinical pharmacologist to do scientific research on ethnopharmacology and ethnomedicine. This has resulted in a robust collection of references, images and objects that provide global coverage of the material cultures of both disciplines. Since his retirement, he is converting the collected data and materials into a coherent set of digital files about diseases, doctors and drugs in native and ancient societies. As his only aim is to preserve and disseminate his expertise in these matters, all files are made freely accessible through Academia.edu. If you consider this review to be a useful source in your research, please acknowledge this by including it as an attributive reference in your own publications.
Archeological investigations of ancient psychoactive substances
Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 2018
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited, a link to the CC License is provided, and changesif anyare indicated.
Ancient Pharmacology - Theophrastus' Historia Plantarum and Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis
The focus of the following study was to examine the state of pharmacology in the ancient world through the texts of Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder to give a better understanding of Classical Greek and Roman pharmacology. Both men authored vital works to the preservation and transmission of pharmacological data. This study will look further into each man's works to evaluate their 'scientific' qualities; how did they conduct their research, how did they write their works, and how each work is vital for the interdisciplinarity of history and science. Each work will also be evaluated for its scientific value today, relating the information each man wrote and how it can be used for current research. Ultimately, this study has the goal of showing that ancient texts have a vital role to play in a larger capacity than just the humanities, but also the sciences. Science is an evolving being that requires progress and with the inclusion of historic texts, which have been underutilized, there is a whole new body of research to be discovered. Before examining Theophrastus' Enquiry into Plants or Historia Plantarum and Pliny the Elder's Natural History or Historia Naturalis, it is useful to examine the history of pharmacology up to their works and briefly examining the impact of their works after ancient times. Pharmacology begins prehistorically with some evidence of early modern humans and the use of plants. The beginning of written history is where the beginnings of pharmacology start to take shape. To better understand the tradition each man was continuing and their impacts on future progress, the brief history of pharmacology will be examined in ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Empirical Rome, The Golden Age of Islam, and the European Renaissance. There is of course a large tradition of pharmacology in Chinese and Indian medicine, but for the study of Theophrastus and Pliny, the pharmacology of the Mediterranean is all that needs to be encompassed.