Jacek Drobnik

Fundamentals of Linnaean taxonomy were established from the late 1730s and had a gradual ordering impact on all plant knowledge of the time. Pharmaceutical botany was enlivened by the following assertions, ideas or publications issued by Linnaeus: 1) the sexual system as a tool for practical identifi cation of genera; 2) the genera were newly defi ned or corrected to build a clear system; 3) botanists were encouraged to construct and study a natural system of genera which was expected to reveal similarities in pharmacological actions (as analogous to morphological similarities of allied species); 4) a critical and minimalist review of medicinal species and their therapeutical uses was published; 5) the synonymy of species was rectifi ed by selecting only good and suffi ciently descriptive polynomials; and fi nally 6) it became the new scientifi c standard to typify the name and description of a species on a proof sample, the role of which began to be played by a herbarium specimen of a plant, called a type. The practice of assigning binominal names to known or newly described species enabled botanists to place them immediately in the sexual system (by assigning a generic name, the genus was ranked in terms of fl ower structure). The increase in the number of medicinal plant species at the end of the 18th century was the result of a desire to make the knowledge complete and modern, and to add new facts about related species in a wellorganized form. Canons for the experimental and clinical study of effects of known and new medicinal plants on healthy and sick patients were being developed. The introduction of many new species into practical therapy took pharmacy by surprise, as the pharmacist had to learn to recognise medicinal plants previously unknown to pharmacy, which was not without its mistakes. Misrecognised plants that became drug ingredients could exert unintended effects in therapy, undermining the authority of physicians, hindering the evaluation of drugs and threatening to fl ood scientifi c pharmacy with a stream of erroneous knowledge. Continued practical self-education of pharmacists in the fi eld of plant taxonomy was therefore claimed.