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Pharmacognosy is the study of medicines from natural sources.

Originally - during the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century - the term (used for the first time by the Austrian physician Schmidt in 1811) was used to define the branch of the medicine or even of the commodity sciences ("Warenkunde" in German), which dealt with medicines in their crude, or unprepared, form.

As "crude drug" it is in fact to be meant here a dried unprepared natural material, which is used in the medicine (the term drug derives in fact originally by the Lower Saxon/Dutch "Droog", which means "dried" and has little to do with the "modern" meaning of the term).

The word "Pharmacognosy" derives in fact from the Greek words pharmakon (drug), and gnosis or knowledge.

The term "Pharmakognosie" represented for years in the German speaking area - where this term was born and the discipline had and still has its linchpin - a synonym of "Drogenkunde" ("science of the crude drugs").

Pharmacognosy is meant today as a branch of the pharmacy, which has its focus on medicines from natural sources (plants, animal-derived products, minerals) and whose scope is the identification or authentication of crude drugs (using macroscopical, microscopical, or chemical methods), and their bio-pharmacological and clinical evaluations.

Most of the pharmacognostic studies are generally focused on medicinal plants/herbal medicines.

The pharmacognosy includes nowadays a very trans-disciplinary approach involving a broad spectrum of both bio-scientific and - increasingly in the recent years - even socio-scientific subjects: the botany, ethnobotany, chemistry (phytochemistry), pharmacology, pharmaceutics, clinical pharmacy and pharmacy practice related to the bio-scientfic evaluation and clinical uses of medicines from natural sources, as well as their implications in the health care management and public health as well.

In a few academic contexts, the term has been artificially extended to cover also the study of pure, isolated substances of natural origin as well as the search for new drugs from natural sources (although that should be considered a branch of the organic chemistry known as "natural product chemistry").

Although today pharmacognosy is still taught in a small number of university pharmacy schools in US and in the UK, this subject is still obligatory within the pharmacy curricula in all universities of continental Europe.

• International Society for Ethnopharmacology
• ESCOP - European Scientific Cooperative on Phytotherapy
• American Society of Pharmacognosy
• GA/Society for Medicinal Plant Research

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