Opinion: The miracle of medicines

We don’t know what induced an ancestral human in pain to eat the seed head of the opium poppy. We do know, from the Ebers papyrus, that by 1500 B.C. the Egyptians were using complex mixtures of plants as medicine, and that they realized there was a fine line between doses that improved health and doses that caused toxicity. Opium might bring relief from pain, but it also caused sleepiness, addiction, and even death.

Until relatively recently, all drug discovery began with folklore and folk medicine, like the elderly woman in the 1770s telling William Withering that her (heart failure) included the purple foxglove plant, which