mandragora officinarum/scopolamine

BACKGROUND A large number of plants, seeds, and berries have been used for medicinal, psychotropic, or aphrodisiac purposes for a thousand years. Mandragora officinarum belongs to the family of Solanaceae and is traditionally known as an aphrodisiac and is closely associated with

Mandrakes (Mandragora spp., Solanaceae) are known to contain tropane alkaloids and have been used since antiquity in traditional medicine. Tropane alkaloids such as scopolamine and hyoscyamine are used in modern medicine to treat pain, motion sickness, as eye pupil dilators and antidotes against

BACKGROUND Past practices of compound drugs from different plant ingredients enjoyed remarkable longevity over centuries yet are largely dismissed by modern science as subtherapeutic, lethal or fanciful. OBJECTIVE To examine the phytochemical content of a popular medieval opiate drug called the

Serious poisoning may occur following the consumption of Chinese herbal medicines (CHM) containing anticholinergics. The great majority of cases are probably related to the use of yangjinhua, the dried flower of Datura metel L, for treating bronchial asthma, chronic bronchitis, pains and flu

Although this year marks the 150th anniversary of the discovery of modern surgical anaesthesia, surgery itself has a much longer history. It is well known that extracts from the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, were used to dull the pain of surgery during ancient times but less well known that

Opium has been known for millennia to relieve pain and its use for surgical analgesia has been recorded for several centuries. The Sumerian clay tablet (about 2100 BC) is considered to be the world's oldest recorded list of medical prescriptions. It is believed by some scholars that the opium poppy