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Asked by anon-197104 to Sebastian, Paddy, Lee, Jennifer, Fiona, Eleanor on 4 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-197105, anon-197106.
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Lee Steinberg answered on 4 Mar 2019:
This might be a bit of a cheaty answer, but the use of medicinal plants dates back for approximately 60,000 years, according to archaeologists. We still find lots of potential drugs by looking at nature!
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Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 4 Mar 2019: last edited 4 Mar 2019 2:14 pm
That’s an interesting question!
In the old days, people used to use plants as medicine, but that wasn’t because they knew that there were chemicals in them but usually because older generations told them that the plants had medicinal benefits. A similar thing nowadays is if you have a cold, sometimes your parents or grandparents will make you a hot honey and lemon drink. Honey actually has antibacterial properties in it, so it can act as a weak medicine. It wasn’t until around the mid-19th Century that people started to work out that it was chemicals in natural sources that actually gave them the medicinal properties rather than the plants themselves! Antibiotics were discovered in the early 20h Century, and they really revolutionised medicine!
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Fiona Scott answered on 4 Mar 2019:
Great question Meg! I think its quite difficult to pin down what the first drug was. Often a lot of early medicines came from nature. Doctors would notice that rubbing a particular leaf on your arm reduced swelling so they then worked out what the “active agent” in that plant was.
I heard in a talk once that the earliest mention of use of a natural product medicine was by King David in the Bible. He talks about using a plant called hyssop to make him clean. https://biblehub.com/psalms/51-7.htm
Even today new drugs are being found from seaweeds and elsewhere in nature!
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Jennifer Harris answered on 5 Mar 2019:
Depending on your definition of drug. In the medical science sector we think of treatments, which allows you to include natural drugs such as caffeine and opium which were used to treat illnesses and as medical substances. Morphine, which is a strong painkiller, I think was invented in the early 1800s – so probably a good example of modern medicine.
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