Ancient Herbal Medicines in Peru

Health treatment in the ancient past was far more different than the Modern Medicine used today, the latter relying on medicine and synthetics to deal with physical illnesses—in fact, Americans use prescription drugs more than any other nation, with Japan a close second, then Germany, France, and China. The U.S., as an example, uses 10½ times as many prescription drugs as does the next nation, Mexico, and 5½ times more generic drugs than the second, leading country, Germany (and almost 16 times more than Mexico).
    The oldest remedies known to mankind are herbal medicines, which refers to health practices, approaches, knowledge and beliefs incorporating plant, animal and mineral based medicines. Also called botanical medicine, phytomedicine, or phytotherapy, Herbal medicine refers to herbs, herbal materials, herbal preparations, and finished herbal products that contain parts of plants or other materials as active ingredients. The plant parts used in herbal therapy include seeds, berries, roots, leaves, fruits, bark, flowers, or even the whole plants.

The ancient Egyptian Ebers Papyrus lists over 800 herbal plant medicines

 

For millennia, man was mainly dependent on crude botanical material for medical needs to retain vitality and cure diseases. This changed once aspirin derived from Spiraea ulmaria was introduced, which had already been prescribed for fever and swelling in Egyptian papyri and recommended by the Greek Hippocrates for pain and fever.
    Even today, practitioners of “conventional” medicine do not hesitate to recommend herbs, herbal products, or complementary and alternative medicine therapy to their patients for the effective treatment of certain diseases. In fact, a recent survey indicated that about 40% of adults and 11% of children used herbal medicine, which are more commonly used by people with higher levels of education and income. Additional surveys have shown that the use of Herbal Medicine is significantly correlated with higher education level, with a trend towards greater use in younger patients with breast cancer.
    In addition, we find that in the Book of Mormon, it is made quite clear that the Lord provided medicinal plants and herbs (herbal medicine) which the Nephites used.
    An example of plants used in Herbal Medicine would be basil, a common herb used to garnish salads, pasta, and many other meals to add delicious flavor. However, basil is an excellent medicinal herb; has strong antibacterial properties; is rich in antioxidants; reduces stress, inflammation and swelling; prevents some harmful effects of aging; strengthens bones and liver; boosts immunity and metabolism, and improves digestion. At the same time, a medicinal plant would be the Chinchona, which provides alkaloid quinine, which for more than 4,000 years was the only way to treat malaria (deadly fever).
    It is also important to note that Herbal Medicine is often the only accessible and affordable treatment available in many parts of the world. In Africa, as an example, up to 80% of the population uses Traditional Medicine as the primary healthcare system; in Chile it is 71% and in China and Colombia it is 40%. In many Asian countries Traditional Medicine is widely used, even though Western or Modern Medicine is often readily available. The number of visits to providers of Traditional Medicine now exceeds by far the number of visits to all primary care physicians in the US. Forty-eight percent of the population in Australia, 70% in Canada, 42% in the US, 38% in Belgium and 75% in France, have used Traditional Medicine. A survey of 610 Swiss doctors showed that 46% had used some form of Traditional Medicine.

Use of medicinal plants in Northern Peru, with special focus on the Departments of Piura, Lambayeque, La Libertad, Cajamarca, and San Martin, made up the center of the old Central Andean "Health Axis," stretching from Ecuador to Peru and Bolivia. The roots of traditional healing practices in this region go at least as far back as the Moche period (100–700 AD), who developed irrigation canals into an extensive system of irrigation, but it was no doubt used long before them, particular during the Chavin culture (900 to 200 BC); and also traced back to the Cupisnique culture (1000 BC).
    In fact, many cultures throughout Peru can trace their healers, collectors, and sellers of medicinal plants. Over 974 preparations with up to 29 different ingredients were used to treat 164 health conditions. Almost 65% of the medicinal plants were applied in these mixtures.
    Their antibacterial activity was confirmed in most plants used for infections, and Twenty-four percent of the aqueous extracts and 76% of the ethanolic extracts showed toxicity. Traditional preparation methods take this into account when choosing the appropriate solvent for the preparation of a remedy. The increasing demand for medicinal species did not increase the cultivation of medicinal plants. Most species are collected in the wild, causing doubts about the sustainability of trade.
    In fact, early on there was little sufficient information either concerning the reasons for an illness or concerning which plant and how it could be utilized as a cure—everything was based on experience. In time, the reasons for the usage of specific medicinal plants for treatment of certain diseases were being discovered; thus, the medicinal plants’ usage gradually abandoned the empiric framework and became founded on known and understood facts. Until the advent of iatrochemistry in 16th century, plants had been the source of treatment and means to combat illness.

While medicinal plants can be found almost anywhere, the area of Mesopotamia and Egypt in the Old World and Andean Peru (Ecuador through Peru to Bolivia) in the New World are the most prolific

In numerous writings of different parts of the world, medicinal plants have been described and their use outlined. According to data from the Bible and the Jewish Talmud, as well as he body of Jewish civil and ceremonial law and legend comprising the Mishnah and the Gemara, that during various rituals accompanying a treatment, aromatic plants were utilized such as myrtle and incense.
    In fact, the Hebrews were well familiar with medicinal plants and herbs. In Mesopotamia, the written study of herbs dates back over 5,000 years to the Sumerians, who created clay tablets with lists of hundreds of medicinal plants, such as myrrh and opium. The same is true in ancient Egypt regarding diseases of the limbs to those of the limbs.
    They used over 850 plant medicines, including garlic, juniper, cannabis, castor bean and mandrake. The herbs used by Egyptian healers were mostly indigenous in origin, although some were imported from other regions like Lebanon. Other than papyri, evidence of herbal medicine has also been found in tomb illustrations or jars containing traces of herbs.
    It should be noted, that about 50% of the plants in use reported in the colonial period have disappeared from the popular pharmacopoeia, the plant knowledge of the population is much more extensive than in other parts of the Andean region.
    510 plant species used for medicinal purposes were collected, identified and their vernacular names, traditional uses and applications recorded. The families best represented were Asteraceae (aster, daisy, sunflower) with 69 species; Fabaceae (legumes) 35; Lamiaceae (mints and balms) 25; Solanaceae (nightshade, jimson, tobacco) 21; Euphorbiaceae (Spurge, snakeweed) 12; Apiaceae (celery) 11; and Poaceae (bamboo, barley, grass) 11 species.
    Herbs in this ancient Andean area were used for the treatment of respiratory disorders (95 species), problems of the urinary tract (85), infections of female organs (66), liver ailments (61), inflammations (59), stomach problems (51) and rheumatism (45). 83% of these plants were native to Peru, and fresh plants, often collected wild, were used in two thirds of all cases, and the most common applications included the ingestion of herb al preparations or the application of plant material as poultices.

Euphorbia characias Dwarf

As an example, Euphorbia, mentioned above, was used for female disorders, asthmas and other breathing disorders, bronchitis and chest congestion, mucus in the nose and throat, spasms, hay fever and vomiting. On the other hand, the cinchona tree has a singular use, which is in the bark that when ground creates quinine, the cure for malaria.
    It is interesting that because of the climate at certain times of the year, Nephites were dying from killer fevers. Mormon makes this perfectly clear: “And there were some who died with fevers, which at some seasons of the year were very frequent in the land—but not so much so with fevers, because of the excellent qualities of the many plants and roots which God had prepared to remove the cause of diseases, to which men were subject by the nature of the climate” (Alma 46:40, emphasis added).
    Now quinine, the only plant or herb known that treats and cures malaria, comes singularly from the Chinchona tree, which is indigenous to Andean Peru and found nowhere else in the world until it was transplanted in Indonesia in the 17^th century.
    In fact, Andean Peru an into the Amazon Basin, is the major location on the planet for medicinal plants and herbs.
    It should be noted that plants are rich in a variety of compounds, many are secondary metabolites and include aromatic substances, most of which are phenols or their oxygen-substituted derivatives such as tannins. Many of these compounds have antioxidant properties and ethnobotanicals are important for pharmacological research and drug development—not only when plant constituents are used directly as therapeutic agents, but also as starting materials for the synthesis of drugs or even as models for pharmacologically active compounds.
    In addition, 65% of the medicinal flora use in Peru were applied anciently in medicinal mixtures. This included 714 medicinal plants, 510 medicinal and 974 remedies of mixtures, which demonstrates that herbal commerce in Peru was a major economic resource (Angel Josabad Alonso-Castro, “Use of medicinal plants by health professionals in Mexico,” US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bathesda MD, Dec 14, 2016).
    The entire U.S. has a goal of producing 300 mixtures. In Mesoamerica, much of the herbology practiced was specifically to deter stomach ailments probably due to their constant state of dread and knowledge that their world was doomed to disastrous endings and constant perils. Mesoamerica has but 139 plant species belonging to 61 families in Mexico, Central America, and Caribbean (Angel Josabad Alonso-Castro, “Use of medicinal plants by health professionals in Mexico,” US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bathesda MD, Dec 14, 2016)