herbs and spices and the plants that come with them are as integral to our day-to-day lives as earth and water.

And no, this is not a throwback to Leonitis and the demands upon him in the 300,

but rather a reminder that these naturally occurring plants and the chemicals within them

have been a part of medicine both traditional and modern for hundreds of years.

There are numerous examples of when we in medicine have taken tree bark or leaves, roots, and other plants and found that they contain healing properties.

Just looking back in history, Hippocrates used the leaves of the willow plant to treat headaches and muscle pains.

By the early 1800, scientists had isolated the active ingredient known as aspirin.

In the 1600s, a Spanish physician found that the bark of the chinchona tree treated malaria.

Later, the cinchona bark was shown to contain quinine,

a medicine now proven to kill the parasite that causes malaria.

Artemisia, an herb used by East Asian healers for more than a thousand years,

was found to contain another anti-malarial drug which later when purified became

Artemisinin. These chemicals and all these various discoveries all started out as

plants. In the late 1700s William Witherring used the Foxglove plant to treat people with heart conditions.

He didn't realize he was doing an amazing thing because later Foxglove was found to contain digitalis,

a drug that increases heart contractility.

The Foxglove plant has long fascinated chemists, physicians, and leaving those into the

macabre side of life. The only other plant that's actually drawn this much attention is the

Mandrake and not like the one in Professor Pomona Sprout's class. The plant does not scream

and kill those who can hear it, but it does actually have anti-colonergic and hallucinogenic

properties. When mixed with other plants, it could actually produce hallucinations of flying.

Confessions of those who use this concoction, albeit under torture, gave rise to the belief

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