Modern Medicine and Pharmaceutics

Abstract

There are evidences that people have been using medicine to cure illness from the early civilization in Africa, Asia and Europe. The wide varieties of treatments such as Shamanism, surgery and drug formulations have been practiced. The drug materials from the plants, animals, minerals were used for the medicinal purposes, are referred today as “Crude Drugs”. As knowledge on disease and drugs is expanded further and more purified form of the materials were chosen to prepare further effective drugs and medicines. As the development of modern societies immersed in the world, two different philosophical approaches in the field of medicinal treatment came forward. In the Eastern societies such as in China and India, holistic approaches were adopted. In these societies, disease or illness is considered as an integral part of the body and can be corrected with the selected foods or formulation of crude drugs mainly derived from plants and a few from animals or minerals together with the body adoptation. But in contrast, in the Western society, disease is considered as the separate entity from the body and can be eliminated by surgery or using particular chemical substance. Especially in the western medicine, the practice of using purified form or pure chemical substances is developed. The knowledge on chemical sciences especially synthetic chemistry and purification techniques were rigorously developed to fulfil the need of chemical substance. This led to not only the foundation for the development of science and technology but also the concept of industrialization came forward.