Introduction
Kitapta bölümler > Diğer · 2021
Yazarlar: Khafsa Malik, Mushtaq Ahmad, Münir Öztürk, Volkan Altay, Muhammad Zafar, Shazia Sultana
Herbals of Asia, Diğer, Uluslararası, 2021, ss 1-35, ,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-85222-1_1
Özet
All through the history, people have used plants as an important source of pharmaceuticals. People have explored herbal drugs in nature to cure diseases (Jamshidi-Kia et al. 2018; Ozturk and Hakeem 2018, 2019a, b; Masoodi et al. 2020). The history of folk medicine in fact dates back to the beginning of human history which included the use of plants and plant extracts, including fungi, bee products, minerals, shells, and even certain animals (Butler 2004; Shinwari 2010). The earliest documented record dates from the Paleolithic age (50,000 B.C.). This record has been reported from the grave of a Neanderthal man in the southern part of Hakkari in southeast Turkey (Baytop 1999). A number of plant remedies are described on the clay tablets that have survived from the Mesopotamian civilizations from Turkey. In the written record, the study of herbs dates back over 5000 years to the Sumerians, who provided clay tablets with lists of hundreds of medicinal plants including myrrh and opium (Yeşilada 2005). In 1500 B.C., the Ancient Egyptians wrote the Ebers Papyrus, which contains information on over 850 plant medicines, including garlic, juniper, cannabis, castor bean, aloe, and mandrake (Lyoussi 2011). Out of approximately 300,000 plant taxa reported from the world, nearly 10% are used to cure ailing communities. The medicines of plant origin, medical herbalism, herbal medicine, herbology, or phytotherapy are defined as the use of plants to cure the diseases of living beings (Shinwari 2010; Ullah et al. 2013; Ozturk et al. 2014, 2017a, b, c, 2018a, b, c, d, e, f, 2021a, b; Altay et al. 2015a, b; Altay and Karahan 2017).