Medicines are any form of chemical, animal, or vegetable substances that in a reasonable dose can heal, relieve, or prevent disease and its symptoms.
In the past (until now 😉), most drugs come from plants. Ancient people cure illness from try-try ways. The term is cool "empirical". Empirical means based on experience and kept and developed from generation to generation until the so-called People's Medical Science or commonly called Traditional Medicine Herbs.
However, not all drugs "start" their history as anti-disease drugs. There is a drug that was originally used as a poison like strychnine & curare that is used as poison by the inhabitants of Africa. The most up to date example is nitrogen-mustard (originally used as a toxic gas during the first world war) as a cancer drug.
This type of vegetable medicine is usually used with a boiled way. The resulting effects also vary, depending on the origin of the plant and how to manufacture. Well, these conditions are behind the chemists to isolate the active substances contained in medicinal plants.
Many chemicals have been isolated, such as ephedrine (from Ma Huang plant - Ephedra vulgaris ), digoxin ( digitalis lanata ), genistein (from soybeans) and others.
Just around the beginning of the 20th century, synthetic chemicals began to "show themselves." Aspirin is one of the indicators of the progress of synthetic chemical drugs at the time. In 1935 there was a breakthrough in the discovery and use of chemotherapeutic sulfanilamide followed by penicillin in 1940. As commonly known, traditionally, festering wounds can be cured by covering them with certain types of molds, but only in 1928 this efficacy was only investigated scientific by Dr. Alexander Fleming. From the results of research Dr. Alexander Fleming, penicillin was discovered.
Since then, thousands of synthetic substances have been discovered (estimated at about 500 substances per year). This makes the development in the field of Pharmacotherapy increased rapidly.
In general, most "old" drugs have been abandoned and replaced with more "modern" medicines. Eits, does not mean modern medicine can "relax", because the next competition is among fellow modern medicine. Because modern medicine can be replaced with newer and more efficacious modern medicine and more effective.
Even so, it is estimated that more than 78% of the drugs currently in circulation are the result of the discovery of the last three decades
- adapted from several sources, one of which is the Important Drugs of Tjay and Kirana