Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

1686 Stockholm ‘Pharmacopoeja Holmiensis Galeno-Chymica’
1697 Brugge
1699 Edinburgh
1807 Dublin
1732 Paris. ‘CODEX Medicamentarius seu Pharmacopoea Parisiensis’
1778 Ratisbonne, Le Hague, Madrid and Liège. These were updated at
irregular intervals.
Similarly national pharmacopoeias were published.
1581 Spain
1775 Sweden ‘Pharmacopoea Svecica’
1778 Russia ‘Pharmacopoea Rossica’
1818 France ‘Codex medicamentarius sive pharmacopoea Gallica’
1820 USA (There had been an army Pharmacopoeia in 1778)
1864 Britain,
1872 Germany
1886 Japan
The World Catalogue lists 729 pharmaceutical works prior to 1880. It was not
possible to study all these for traces of pharmacovigilance, so a selection of herbals,
dispensatories and pharmacopoeias has been made. The early works prior to 1 AD
contained between 240 to 700 different drugs. The Chinese works contained over
1,000 drugs; one reaching 20,000 drugs. After 1 AD the numbers varied between
100 and 2,850 drugs. It is clear that with these large numbers space for adverse
effects would have been very limited. Pharmacopoeias written by individuals will be
mentioned later in the chapter.
483–1682 The Age of Herbals and Dispensatories
A herbal has been defined as a book containing the names and descriptions of
herbs, or of plants in general, with their properties and virtues. The word is believed
to have been derived from a mediaeval Latin adjective ‘herballs’; the substantive
‘liber’ meaning ‘book’ being understood. It is thus exactly comparable in origin with
the word ‘manual’ in the sense of a hand-book. Herbals are compendious
descriptions of therapeutic plants and their uses in medicine as well as general
descriptions of plants, often accompanied by numerous illustrations depicting the
various plants, Facts are often accompanied by superstitions. The term ‘herbal’
(herbarium) usually refers to early printed books of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries on the therapeutic properties of plants used in medicine. However, it can
be applied to earlier works dealing with the same topic, from their prototype, ‘De
materia medica’ by the Greek Dioscorides (first century AD), to late-medieval
compilations such as the early fourteenth-century ‘Liber de herbis’.
In their medieval canonical form, herbals usually consisted of a list of plants
whose parts (roots, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds) were used as primary