The Longest Continuous Practice
People are looking backward because they sense, correctly, that what we are reaching for now is not new — that the jars on my shelf are a late entry in a very long ledger.
I keep a small run of botanical and pharmacological textbooks from the 1960s and 1970s on the desk where I work, and I read them the way some people read history, because in part that is what they are. Herbal medicine is the oldest sustained healthcare practice on Earth. Every culture that lasted long enough built one. The timeline below follows the Western thread — with the caveat that parallel traditions, no less developed, grew up in China, India, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, and that they crossed into one another far more than the tidy regional story admits.
Prehistory (Before 3000 BCE)
Plant medicine predates writing. The 5,300-year-old “Iceman” mummy found in the Alps was carrying birch polypore, a fungus with antiparasitic properties, and he had intestinal parasites. The Shanidar Cave Neanderthal burials in Iraq, around 60,000 years old, contained pollen from eight medicinal plant species including yarrow and ephedra — though whether mourners placed those flowers deliberately, or burrowing rodents carried the pollen in, is still debated.
These practices were almost certainly trial-and-error knowledge transmitted across generations. There is no founding text. There is no first herbalist. There is only the long process of paying attention to what plants did and remembering.
The First Written Records (3000–1000 BCE)
Sumerian clay tablets (~2600 BCE) in modern Iraq list around 250 medicinal plants and their preparations. The oldest extant medical text is essentially an herbal.
Egyptian Ebers Papyrus (~1550 BCE) documents 700 herbal formulas, including the use of garlic for circulation, opium poppy for pain, and pomegranate for parasites. Many of these remedies have since been validated by modern research.
Chinese Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing (compiled ~200 BCE from older traditions) — the classical Chinese herbal documenting 365 herbs. Its system of energetics (warming/cooling, ascending/descending) became the framework for two thousand years of Chinese herbal practice.
Indian Charaka Samhita (~400 BCE–200 CE) — the foundational Ayurvedic text. Documents the use of triphala, ashwagandha, turmeric, and hundreds of other plants in a system still practiced today.
The Greek and Roman Synthesis (500 BCE–500 CE)
Hippocrates (~400 BCE) grounded medicine in observation and the use of common plants. His humoral theory was wrong about mechanisms but right about close observation.
Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica (~70 CE) documented 600 plants. It remained the standard medical reference in Europe and the Islamic world for 1,500 years.
Galen (~150 CE) systematized Greek medicine into a framework that dominated European practice until the Renaissance. His specific recommendations were often wrong; his methodology of building systematic catalogs of plant actions was foundational.
The Islamic Golden Age (700–1300 CE)
Often missing from Western histories. The Islamic scholarly world preserved, translated, and extended Greek medical knowledge while Europe was in the early medieval period.
Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine (1025 CE) consolidated Greek, Roman, Indian, and Arab medical knowledge into a five-volume work that became the standard medical textbook in European universities for 500 years. It remained an active reference into the 17th century.
Al-Razi, Ibn al-Baitar, and others contributed extensive pharmacological writing. Al-Baitar’s 13th-century herbal documented 1,400 plants and drugs.
Most of the herbs we now think of as “Mediterranean” or “Western” passed through Islamic scholarship before reaching medieval Europe.
Medieval European Monasteries (500–1300 CE)
In the same centuries, European herbal knowledge kept to a narrower channel — it survived mostly in monastic gardens. Benedictine monks tended herb beds and copied what medical texts they could. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) wrote two extensive medical works that braided Greek herbalism together with German folk knowledge.
Then the plague pandemics of the 14th century tore through the institutions that held all of it. Established remedies failed, and the failure pushed people toward empirical experiment; folk herbalism filled the gaps that monastic medicine could not.
The Renaissance and Early Modern Period (1400–1700)
Paracelsus (1493–1541) challenged Galenic orthodoxy and introduced the principle that “the dose makes the poison” — a foundational pharmacological insight.
The European herbals (1500s–1700s) — John Gerard’s Herball, Nicholas Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, and dozens of others — produced illustrated, popular references that survived as folk medicine for centuries. Culpeper deliberately wrote in English rather than Latin to democratize medical knowledge against the College of Physicians’ monopoly.
Columbian Exchange (1492 onward). European, African, and Indigenous American herbal traditions began centuries of forced interaction, exchange, and appropriation. Many plants we now consider Western (coffee, tobacco, capsicum, potato, corn) entered European practice in this period.
The Pharmaceutical Era Begins (1800–1950)
This is where the thread I have been following starts to fray, and it frays for reasons worth naming plainly.
The first was chemistry learning to pull a single compound out of a whole plant. Morphine came out of the opium poppy in 1804, salicylic acid out of willow bark in 1828, caffeine in 1820. Each isolation made standardized dosing possible and nudged medicine toward the “active ingredient” — the molecule, scrubbed of the plant it came from.
Then synthesis cut the cord entirely. Bayer made aspirin from salicylic acid in 1897, and a medicine that had once required a willow now required only a factory.
The last development was not chemical at all. The Flexner Report of 1910, funded by a US foundation, recommended closing most medical schools that did not teach pharmaceutical, laboratory-grounded medicine. It worked. Formal herbal training in North America effectively ended for two generations. Herbalism did not die — it went to ground, in folk practice, in Appalachia, in African American communities — but it lost its standing, and losing standing is its own kind of erasure.
The Revival (1960–Present)
Herbal medicine never disappeared from the world; it disappeared from a particular professional class in a particular hemisphere. Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and dozens of regional systems carried on in their home places throughout the 20th century, untroubled by the Flexner Report. In the West, what looks like a revival began in the 1960s.
This is where my own shelf comes in. The textbooks I keep — sober, clinical, written before the wellness industry existed, full of dosages and Latin binomials and not one word about manifesting — date from exactly these decades, when the counterculture turned back toward traditional medicine and a handful of figures kept the working knowledge intact: Juliette de Baïracli Levy, Adelma Grenier Simmons, Susun Weed. The books do not read as fringe. They read as a practice being quietly handed forward.
The 1980s and 1990s built the scaffolding — schools and certifications. Rosemary Gladstar founded the California School of Herbal Studies; the American Herbalists Guild formed; Germany produced the Commission E monographs, the most serious pharmacological assessment of herbs of its era.
The 2000s and 2010s brought the supplement boom, much of it cut loose from any tradition at all, alongside real clinical research on specific plants — echinacea, St. John’s wort, ginkgo.
And then 2020 — which is where I came in, and where a great many others did too. The pandemic drove the largest spike of interest in herbal medicine since the 1970s: immune support, the nervous system, the small sovereignty of being able to make a thing yourself when the shelves go bare. I do not think the timing is incidental. People reach for plants when the larger system stutters.
The Frame
Set the whole timeline end to end and the shape of it is hard to miss. The practice is older than any single tradition that claims it, and more tangled across cultures than any one culture’s telling allows. And the brief hundred-year stretch when herbal medicine was pushed out of Western professional life is the strange interval — the exception a long memory should treat as exception, not as the natural order finally arriving.
What people are doing now — pairing old knowledge with current research, growing their own herbs, learning from more than one lineage and trying to do it with respect — sits much closer to that long norm than the pharmaceutical-only century did. I think about this when I am standing over a jar of tincture that will not be ready for six weeks, doing a thing someone was also doing in a Sumerian courtyard, a Benedictine garden, a 1970s kitchen. None of it is invention. It is remembering, with better instruments.
Frequently Asked Questions
How old is herbal medicine?
At least 60,000 years. A Neanderthal burial at Shanidar Cave in Iraq contained pollen from eight medicinal plants still used today — though whether that pollen was placed deliberately is contested. Written records begin around 2600 BCE with Sumerian clay tablets listing roughly 250 plant medicines. Every human culture independently developed an herbal pharmacopoeia — the practice is older than agriculture.
What is the Ebers Papyrus?
The Ebers Papyrus is an Egyptian medical text from around 1550 BCE — one of the oldest and most complete records of herbal medicine. It contains over 700 remedies and references plants still in use: garlic, juniper, frankincense, cumin, fennel, aloe. It reveals an organized pharmaceutical practice with diagnostic categories, dosing, and preparation methods.
How did medieval monasteries preserve herbal knowledge?
Monastic infirmaries and physic gardens kept the practice alive through the European Middle Ages. Monks copied Greek and Roman herbal texts, cultivated medicinal plants in cloister gardens, and treated local communities. Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) is the most famous — her writings remain a touchstone of Western herbalism.
Why did herbal medicine decline in the 20th century?
Industrial pharmaceuticals, regulatory frameworks favoring single-molecule drugs, and the AMA's deliberate marginalization of botanical practice in the early 1900s pushed herbal medicine to the cultural margins in North America. Knowledge survived in immigrant communities, Indigenous practice, and in countries like Germany, where it never fully retreated.
Is herbal medicine making a comeback in 2026?
Yes — search interest in 'what is herbal medicine' is at all-time highs, U.S. herbal supplement sales have grown sharply over the past decade, and clinical research into adaptogens, nervines, and antimicrobial plants is now publishing in major journals. The current revival is part of the broader solarpunk shift toward repairable, local, and bioregional knowledge.
Written by E. Silkweaver