The Origins of Medicine

The written histories of medicine are full of the stories of great discoveries, using microscopes and Petri dishes, scalpels and chloroform, herbs and radiation. Results – both hits and misses – were collated and recorded for posterity.

My personal interest in the history of medicine starts further back. Who were the true pioneers? The first people to discover chewing on bark from a certain tree cured headaches and fever, or the leaves of plants much bitten by insects produce the strongest medicine? Who first determined a plant when chewed, cured different ailments than the same plant when brewed?

In nations with no written language, the knowledge of medicinal plants was passed down generations through song and oration. These people knew where on the land surrounding them, they could find a cure for diarrhea or morning sickness; medicine to ease pain at the end of life or following a serious injury.

Over 3500 years ago the Egyptians and ancient Sumerians used the bark of the white willow to treat pain and fever. Hippocrates and Pliny the Elder advocated its use centuries later. Willow bark’s active ingredient – salicin – was not identified until the mid-1800s. Salicylic acid – aspirin – is the refined form and is the most prescribed drug in the world. It’s prescribed for its analgesic, blood thinning, and antipyretic properties.

Morphine is another medicine used for millennia. It is one of three active alkaloids of opium – extracted from the poppy papaver somniferum for over 8000 years. It is still harvested in the same manner, the white sap bled from the unripe seed pod and dried then ingested, smoked or injected. Morphine is named for Morpheus the Greek god of dream; resurrected in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

The use of opium for pain, sleep and recreation was recorded in ancient Chinese, Roman, Indian, Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian texts. Mesopotamian tablets carved in 6000 BCE called the poppy ‘the plant of joy’.

Opium was the favoured drug of many English Romantic poets and writers. Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barret Browning were habitual users. Men said they took the drug as a stimulant, while women poets wrote about the calmness it brought them, and the break from the drudgery of their lives.

Foxglove, with its nodding purple flowers, contains digitalis – the active ingredient in digoxin, still sometimes used to modulate the heart rhythm.

The beautiful white flowers called snowdrops were used in Bulgarian folk medicine as a cure for headaches. What caused someone to pick up the flower and rub it on their throbbing forehead and then note their headache was cured?

Sailors, away at sea for months, surviving on sea biscuits and salted pork did not get sufficient vitamin c to prevent scurvy. Vitamin C occurs naturally in fresh fruits and vegetables. Sailors with scurvy lost their teeth, they bled easily, and could suffer a form of madness. In the 18th century the Royal navy, acting on the work of Lind, issued limes to all British sailors to eliminate scurvy (hence ‘Limeys’.)

Not all early healing methods were botanical. The ancient Egyptians used catgut to suture wounds closed. Māori used flax fibres as sutures. Māori had multiple effective treatments for common ailments, treating the spiritual, psychological and physical aspects of illness using prayer and plants and massage.

I am a retired medical doctor and my training included scant reference to any medication outside modern pharmaceuticals. The people who visit doctors use many other treatments. Homeopathy, herbal remedies, acupuncture, mirimiri massage, and chiropractic manipulation are trusted and used by many. These treatments don’t have long waiting lists, they are effective for some conditions, and if people did not have access to them, the health system would be even more overwhelmed.

Some plant remedies augment or negate the effects of prescribed pharmaceuticals. Medical doctors need to have enough knowledge to ask about and discuss recreational drugs, supplements or complementary treatments before they write prescriptions. I kept a book of Māori healing and herbal on my desk when I was a GP. It kept me informed of the herbs and their active compounds so together my patients and I could navigate any potential problems if they were using rongoā – Māori medicine.

Mila and the Bone Man is set in Northland, New Zealand, near the edge of a forest – a natural pharmacy. The elders in the story use both Croatian and Māori botanical remedies and teach the younger family members to be healers by combining the old ways and the new. There is much to be learned from the old ways – kindness to the Earth provides for us holistic care covering all aspects of what makes us ill. To be fully well we need to look after our spirit, body, family and community. The old ways and the new have much to teach us and are not mutually exclusive.

Dr Lauren Roche, MB, ChB, Dip. Obs, FRNZCGP, MCW.

Author of Bent Not Broken, Life on the Line and Mila and the Bone Man.