bunnyjadwiga

The herbal history fantasy group are prone to claim that herbs as medications were 'driven underground' by the Christian Church and/or the Medical Establishment during the middle ages and Renaissance.

Nancy Siraisi, in Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, p. 141, discusses the types of medication in the medieval physician's arsenal:

Of the three instruments of medicine, medication was the principal form of active intervention by which physicians sought to combat disease. The choice of appropriate medicinal substances and their compounding in proper proportions were central areas of medical knowledge. The foundation of medieval European pharmacy -- as of traditional herbal medicine in other societies-- was the attribution of medicinal powers to commonly available substances, usually plants and often those that might also be used in cooking. Sharp taste, pungent aroma, and unusual texture as well as readily perceptible action of some kind (for example, as a laxative or opiate) were all properties that might lead to the classification of a plant as medicinal. Unquestionably, consistent use of of certain common European plants as medicines began in antiquity and had a continuous history thereafter. But in western Europe, even in the early Middle Ages, this simple "kitchen-garden" medicine was never purely empirical, local, folkloric and handed down by oral tradition-- although these characteristics must surely have been present to some extent -- but seems always also to have contained elements derived from Greek medicine by way of written sources. From the early Middle Ages to the high Renaissance, medicinal recipes were the commonest form of medical writing.