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        Ill-health threatens the sufferers, their relatives and friends and in effect the whole community. There are high economic, social and psychological costs imposed by disease and death. Consequently, it has been the concern of the society all along and the responsibility of Governments, to provide means of maintaining health and curing disease.

EVOLUTION OF SYSTEMS OF MEDICINE

        Every human community was conscious of the burden of disease and developed its own ‘medical system’ which may be defined as "the pattern of social institutions and cultural traditions that evolves from a deliberate behaviour to enhance health" (Dunn, 1976).

        Europe, particularly Greece, was largely responsible for the origin and development of a well documented major trend in medicine. However, the traditional practices have mostly died out there, under the onslaught of modern medicine, now called Allopathy. The rest of the world has a different story.

        The term Allopathy was first used by Hahnemann, the founder of Homoeopathy, to differentiate between his system and the ‘other system of medicine’ in use at that time in Europe. In contrast to Allopathy, most countries in the world have developed what is called the ‘Tradtional medicine’. The World Health Organisation (WHO), created in 1948, is a specialised agency of the United Nations, with the primary responsibility for international health matters and public health. The WHO defined traditional medicine, in 1976, at a meeting at Brazzaville, as "...the sum total of all knowledge and practices, whether explicable or not, used in diagnosis, prevention and elimination of physical, mental or social imbalance and relying exclusively on practical experience and observations handed down from generation to generation, verbally or in writing."

        On the one hand, some systems of medicine, like the Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Siddha, Tibetan medicine, Unani and the humoural pathology of Latin America and the Philippines, etc., have been well recorded and developed extensive literature over a couple of millennia (Goldwater, 1983). On the other hand, there are other systems of medicine, of people who until recently have lacked literature but are effective in handling the health problems of the respective communities. These unwritten medical cultures constitute ‘ethnomedicine’. This new discipline is defined as "those beliefs and practices relating to disease which are products of indigenous cultural developmnt and are not explicitly derived from the conceptual frame work of modern medicine" (Hughes, 1968). By this definition, only the unwritten indigenous knowledge of the tribals and such other small communities, that are not too seriously affected by the onslaught of modern civilisation, and which knowledge has been passed by the word of mouth, from generation to generation, qualifies to be called as ethnomedicine. Since all systems have had such ethnic origins, some scientists argue that the definition of ethnomedicine should be expanded to include even the contemporary allopathic medicine, as well. Such a definition is all inclusive and makes the definition itself useless. By the definition of Hughes (1968), no system of medicine that has written sources, such as Ayurveda, Unani, Chinese medicine, etc., can be considered as ethnomedicine.

        Although there appears to be a vast variety of data on almost every system of ethnomedicine, seemingly impossible to find them in any order, there are several similarities among them. These similarities are due to a) the limited number of causes to which illnesses can be attributed to, because of which there are only so many ways a doctor can treat them, and b) historical contacts and interaction between people of different cultures (Foster, 1983). In spite of fundamental divergences in philosophy, the congruences in the Greek medicine and Unani, in Ayurveda and Unani, in the Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine, etc., reflect such cultural exchange.

A very considerable lot of ethnomedicine is based on the following causes of illness:

a) angry deities who punish the wrongdoers,

b) ancestors and other ghosts feeling belittled,

c) sorcerers and witches hired by revenge seekers,

d) loss of soul,

e) possession by a spirit or intrusion of objects into the body,

f) evil eye, and

g) loss of basic body equilibrium.

The cures for illnesses due to the upset of the body humours and the consequent loss of bodily equilibrium are called ‘natural’ and the cures for illnesses due to the other causes as ‘magical’ or ‘supernatural’. Foster (1983) suggested the terms ‘personalistic’ in place of magical or supernatural and ‘naturalistic’ in place of natural cures. The concepts of ‘dosha’ of Ayurveda and ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ of the Chinese system fall under the naturalistic category while the traditional systems of Africa, Oceania, South America, preconquest North America, etc., fall under the personalistic category (Foster and Anderson, 1978). Personalistic cures are still in practice almost in every country of the developing world, and these constitute the ‘folk medicine’.

One of the aims of WHO is ‘health for all by 2000’ that will permit the citizens of the world to lead a socially and economically productive life. The WHO has recognised indigenous traditional systems of medicine as important to the greater part of the communities in most parts of the world and organised Regional Offices to monitor its activities (see Bannerman et al., 1983), as below:

a) the African Region

b) the Region of the Americas,

c) the South-East Asia Region,

d) the European Region,

e) the Eastern Mediterranean Region, and

f) the Western Pacific Region.

Among the systems of non-ethnomedicine being in use in different parts of the world today, Allopathy stands apart from the rest, in philosophy and methods. All the other systems are together called the ‘Alternative Medicine’. Some of the practitioners of Alternative Medicine are irritated at this terminology and on the basis of antiquity and the immensely large percentage of the world’s population their systems serve, consider Allopathy as the Alternative Medicine. Like the term ‘developing world’ which irritates many but has come to stay as a means of convenient reference, the terms Allopathy and Alternative Medicine should be seen merely as an easy means of communication.

Allopathy, Homoeopathy, and many systems of Alternative Medicine, employ plant based drugs, to varying degrees. It is important to understand the philosophy, methods and the drug armamentarium of these systems in order to be able to evaluate the potential of plants as medicine. For this reason, the different plant based medical systems are introduced here.