Pharmacognosy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pharmacognosy is the study of medicines from natural sources.

Originally - during the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century - the term (used for the first time by the Austrian physician Schmidt in 1811) was used to define the branch of the medicine or even of the commodity sciences ("Warenkunde" in German), which dealt with medicines in their crude, or unprepared, form.

As "crude drug" it is in fact to be meant here a dried unprepared natural material, which is used in the medicine (the term drug derives in fact originally by the Lower Saxon/Dutch "Droog", which means "dried" and has little to do with the "modern" meaning of the term).

The word "Pharmacognosy" derives in fact from the Greek words pharmakon (drug), and gnosis or knowledge.

The term "Pharmakognosie" represented for years in the German speaking area - where this term was born and the discipline had and still has its lynch-pin - a synonym of "Drogenkunde" ("science of the crude drugs").

Pharmacognosy is meant today as a branch of the pharmacy, which has its focus on medicines from natural sources (plants, animal-derived products, minerals) and whose scope is the identification or authentication of crude drugs (in dried form) using macroscopical, microscopical, or chemical methods.

It can includes nowadays the study of the botany, ethnobotany, chemistry, pharmacology, and clinical pharmacy of crude drugs, and most of the pharmacognostic studies are generally focused on medicinal plants/herbal medicines.

In a few academic contexts, the term has been artficially extended to cover also the study of pure, isolated substances of natural origin as well as the search for new drugs from natural sources (although that should be considered a branch of organic chemistry known as "natural product chemistry").

Although today pharmacognosy is taught in very few pharmacy schools in the US and UK, the subject is still obligatory within most pharmacy curricula in continental European universities.