Glossary of pharmacological and medical terms relevant to medicinal plants

Pharmacological and medicinal terminology are generally not needed in this work, as we have avoided technical medical words. Nevertheless, technical medical terms are used so frequently by professionals dealing with medicinal plants that access to a comprehensible dictionary of these terms is advantageous. In addition, technical terms are often employed in the literature references and World Wide Web links provided. Those exploring the subject of medicinal crops often must be able to decipher specialized medical terminology. For these reasons, this extensive glossary is provided.

Herbs have been used to treat virtually every affliction known to mankind, and so all of the terminology of medicine and related disciplines could be used with specific reference to medicinal plants. The present selective list of terms was prepared by inspecting the vocabulary used in recent major surveys of herbal medicine such as Duke (1985) and Wichtl (1994), which are typical of such works in not providing the user with definitions of unfamiliar terminology. If a term is not present here, see the list of internet and hardcopy dictionaries at the end of the glossary. In most cases the shortest spelling of a word is given, with diphthongs reduced (for example, ae to e, as in hemoglobin, not haemoglobin) and American spellings preferred (for example, tumor, not tumour). In many cases alternative spellings and synonyms are given.