Evolution of Medicinal Plant Knowledge in Southern Italy
ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 30 September 2015 doi: 10.3389/fphar.2015.00207 From cumulative cultural transmission to evidence-based medicine: evolution of medicinal plant knowledge in Southern Italy Marco Leonti 1*, Peter O. Staub 1, Stefano Cabras 2, 3, Maria Eugenia Castellanos 4 and Laura Casu 5 1 Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy, 2 Department of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy, 3 Department of Statistics, Carlos III University of Madrid, Getafe, Spain, 4 Department of Informatics and Statistics, Rey Juan Carlos University, Móstoles, Spain, 5 Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy In Mediterranean cultures written records of medicinal plant use have a long tradition. Edited by: This written record contributed to building a consensus about what was perceived to Xue-Jun Sun, be an efficacious pharmacopeia. Passed down through millennia, these scripts have Second Military Medical University, China transmitted knowledge about plant uses, with high fidelity, to scholars and laypersons Reviewed by: alike. Herbal medicine’s importance and the long-standing written record call for a Marcia Hiriart, better understanding of the mechanisms influencing the transmission of contemporary Universidad Nacional Autonoma de medicinal plant knowledge. Here we contextualize herbal medicine within evolutionary Mexico, Mexico Liselotte Krenn, medicine and cultural evolution. Cumulative knowledge transmission is approached by University of Vienna, Austria estimating the causal effect of two seminal scripts about materia medica written by *Correspondence: Dioscorides and Galen, two classical Greco-Roman physicians, on today’s medicinal Marco Leonti, Department of Biomedical Sciences, plant use in the Southern Italian regions of Campania, Sardinia, and Sicily.
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