Introduction

Pharmacognosy is the scientific study of crude drug principles of natural origin including their history, collection, preparation, standardization, use, cultivation, and commerce. Herbal preparations from plant, animal, and mineral are medicinal and promote health beyond basic nutrition. Pharmacognosy is a multidisciplinary subject and requires knowledge of botany, ethnobotany, phytochemistry, microbiology, pharmacology, pharmaceutics, etc. Botany and ethnobotany are important for identification, genetics, cultivation, etc. of drug plants; chemical characterization includes isolation, identification, and quantification of drug plant constituents; and pharmacology informs about the biological effects of the crude drugs on cell cultures, animals and humans. The majority of the drugs available in the market today are obtained mostly from natural sources, and about 80% of the world’s rural people rely on herbal medicine for primary health care. The renaissance of herbal medicine in the recent years has created an urge for intensive studies in the field of pharmacognosy to ascertain the quality, efficacy, and safety of the herbal products. Medicinal plants are widely used across the world in different traditional systems of medicine including Ayurveda, Unani, Homeopathy, Chinese, as well as in the medicinal systems of aborigines. Medicinal plants are the sources of drug components, lead compounds, excipient, etc. of modern medicine. The secondary metabolites (e.g., alkaloids, phenolics, terpenoids, etc.) of drug plants provide the therapeutically active principles of herbal medicine, and more than 180 therapeutic principles of natural origin are used in modern medicine (e.g., ajmalicine, allicin, aspirin, artemisinin). In addition to wild sources, medicinal herbs are now cultivated by agronomic and biotechnological methods to meet the requirement of their smoothness and quality to consumers and trade market. The international market is expanding, about 2500 species of medicinal plants having about 400000 tons, and US$ 1.2 billion were traded during the 1990s and the value is likely to touch US$ 5 trillion by 2050.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Botany, Chittagong University, Chittagong, Bangladesh A. N. M. Alamgir

1. A. N. M. Alamgir