The African Herbal Pharmacopoeia (AfrHP) provides comprehensive, up to date botanical, commercial and phytochemical information on over fifty of the most important African medicinal plants. The technical data were made on plant samples sourced from across the continent. These monographs prepared by leading African scientists, have been reviewed by international experts. Additional data includes micro morphology of the plant material, distribution maps and TLC Chromatograms. These data are crucial for producers, collectors and traders in medicinal plants and extracts as well as researchers, manufacturers and practitioners. The scope, quality and standard of these herbal monographs are comparable to those prepared in Europe, North America and Asia. Whilst this is the very first edition, it is being proposed to proceed to a second edition, quickly, as more plant species will be covered.

This beautifully illustrated textbook pairs research on the biochemical properties and physiological effects of medicinal plants with a history of the ways in which humans have cultivated plant species and investigated their effects. Nature's Pharmacopeia fosters an appreciation of the chemistry and cultural resonance of herbal medicine.

This is the second volume in a series of monographs which are intended to promote information exchange and international harmonised standards for the quality control and use of herbal medicines. It contains scientific information on 30 selected plants, and each entry includes a pharmacopoeial summary for quality assurance purposes, information on its clinical application and sections on contraindications, pharmacology, safety issues, and dosage forms. It provides two cumulative indexes with entries in alphabetical order by plant name and according to the plant material of interest.

A collection of test procedures for assessing the identity, purity, and content of medicinal plant materials, including determination of pesticide residues, arsenic and heavy metals. Intended to assist national laboratories engaged in drug quality control, the manual responds to the growing use of medicinal plants, the special quality problems they pose, and the corresponding need for international guidance on reliable methods for quality control. Recommended procedures - whether involving visual inspection or the use of thin-layer chromatography for the qualitative determination of impurities - should also prove useful to the pharmaceutical industry and pharmacists working with these materials.

This pioneering study offers a conceptual model and rich empirical evidence to help researchers and policy-makers understand informal innovation in developing countries.

Safety is a fundamental principle in the privision of herbal medicines and herbal products for health care and a critical component of quality control. These guidelines provide practical technical guidance for monitoring the safety of herbal medicines with pharmacovigilance systems.

In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John M. Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve’s Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times? Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed “secret knowledge” to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception. Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as “witchcraft” in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by “Eve’s herbs” has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.

Medicinal plant materials are supplied through collection from wild populations and cultivation. Under the overall context of quality assurance and control of herbal medicines WHO developed the Guidelines on good agricultural and collection practices (GACP) for medicinal plants providing general technical guidance on obtaining medicinal plant materials of good quality for the sustainable production of herbal products classified as medicines. These guidelines are also related to WHO's work on the protection of medicinal plants aiming promotion of sustainable use and cultivation of medicinal plants. The main objectives of these guidelines are to: (1) contribute to the quality assurance of medicinal plant materials used as the source for herbal medicines to improve the quality safety and efficacy of finished herbal products; (2) guide the formulation of national and/or regional GACP guidelines and GACP monographs for medicinal plants and related standard operating procedures; and (3) encourage and support the sustainable cultivation and collection of medicinal plants of good quality in ways that respect and support the conservation of medicinal plants and the environment in general. These guidelines concern the cultivation and collection of medicinal plants and include certain post-harvest operations. Good agricultural and collection practices for medicinal plants are the first step in quality assurance on which the safety and efficacy of herbal medicinal products directly depend. These practices also play an important role in protection natural resources of medicinal plants for sustainable use.