In 350–377 BC, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, advised the use of diet and plant medicines. He tried to relieve the pain of his patients by asking them to chew willow bark, which contains salicylic acid. Long before Hippocrates, the ancient Sumerians (5000 BC), Egyptians, and the Chinese (1600–700 BC) were noted to use herbs such as onions, garlic, licorice, ginger, thyme, and Ayurveda was commonly used in India.
In 1640, Nicholas Culpeper published the English Physician People’s Herbal. In 1763 Reverend Stone of Chipping Norton, England, showed the benefit of willow bark (salicylic acid) for individuals with ague fever. In 1775 William Withering, a Birmingham physician, learned of a midwife whose herbal brew had cured several people suffering from dropsy which caused severe swelling of the legs and shortness of breath. Withering studied the brew and concluded that the only active constituent of the 20 or more herbs was derived from the foxglove plant, Digitalis purpurea. He used the herb with a fair amount of success. For the past 210 years digitalis (digoxin) has been used worldwide to treat millions of people with heart failure.