I was going to mention things like aspirin - compounded from willow bark and digitalis - compounded from foxglove but, GingerCoffee beat me to the punch! But here are a few links that might help: http://www.factmonster.com/dk/science/encyclopedia/medicinal-plants.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_plants_used_in_herbalism http://www.plant-medicine.com/ (I would recommend this one as your first source as they have a question and answer option to contact them directly for specific information.)
I'd use those sources with a heavy dose of skepticism. Take this misleading paragraph from the first link: It's partially true and partially false and as written it supports the false claim with the true one. It's true that medical researchers lament the loss of rainforest diversity and there is speculation that, "thousands of possible life-saving drugs" might be lost along with species extinction, much of which is happening before the species have even been identified. But the idea that primitive people and/or ancient remedies have been proven effective is akin to the noble savage myth. If that were really the case, life expectancy wouldn't have gone from somewhere in people's 30s to 70-80 years of age with the development of modern medicine. Of course there is no shortage of websites that promote the ancient remedies were tested over time myth. The problem has been, very little of that testing over time used any semblance of the scientific process. Bloodletting for example, how did that ever become standard practice? Someone bled, got better and the blood letting ritual was assumed causation. Take this report for example, assuming it is true: So indigenous people use thousands of plants as medicine, and thousands of plants have biological activity. And, a lot of medicine originates with a source in nature. Where in that is there evidence that those thousands of drugs used by native healers were actually effective for what they were used for? The article continues: So did those treatments work? I'm not suggesting none of the remedies turned out to actually work. Certainly hallucinogens, poisons for hunting, and pain medicines including local anesthetics like coca leaves were well known. These drugs have very direct effects that were easily observed. But what about drugs for wounds, snake bites, bacterial infections, parasites, diarrhea, fever, and contraception? These are more likely to result in false assumptions that something which got better on its own was due to the use of a medicinal plant. The source of this is a book. I'll have to order it from the library to see if it documents the effectiveness of any of those remedies. In summary: remember to look for unsupported conclusions when you see these kinds of claims.
Look up medical textbooks on Project Gutenberg. These were real textbooks used to train doctors over 100 years ago. Some of the advice is good, some isn't. But it's ALL what people believed to be true at the time.
