History
In times past, the hunter-gatherer community kept knowledge about the medicinal properties of various plants, molds, fungi, yeasts, bacteria, minerals and animals. This drug knowledge would include vast amounts of information like what time of the year to look for specimens, where to look, and what part of the plant to use or how to grind a mineral.
As cultures developed in specialization, a person would take on the combined role of physician, pharmacist and priest or minister. These specialized people would be in charge of the community’s physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.
In English these are often called "medicine men" or shaman. The word shaman comes from Manchu, and is "the only commonly used English word that is a loan from this language". The shaman would use various items from nature to produce a mixture that would be burned, applied, manipulated or ingested in some fashion to help relieve the symptoms the ailing patient.
Eventually, the use of crude drugs reach a zenith in the early 1900s and eventually gave way to the use of purified active ingredients from the natural source. Currently the use and exploration of crude drugs has again gained prominence in the medical community. The realization that many completely unknown substances are yet to be discovered from crude drugs has created a new interest in pharmacognosy and has led to many medical breakthroughs.
In 1907, the Pure Food and Drug Act was implemented and standardization of crude drugs took place. Often the USP would specify what percentage of active ingredient was needed to claim a crude drug met USP standards.
An example of standardization would be as follows (from the United States Pharmacopeia):
Opium is the air-dried milky exudate obtained by incising the unripe capsules of Papaver somniferum Linne or its variety album De Candolle (Fam. Papaveraceae). Opium in its normal air-dried condition yields not less than 9.5 percent of anhydrous morphine.
Read more about this topic: Crude Medicine
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—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
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—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)