Ancient medicinal use of saffron

Dr. Gordon Bendersky at the University of Pennsylvania, and Susan C. Ferrence, a doctoral candidate in art history at Temple University, are publishing a paper in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine that suggests saffron was used medicinally 3500 years ago, based off of interpretations of frescoes from Thera, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea.

This finding pushes back the earliest visual and written use of a medicinal plant by 500 years.

Links:

Researchers Rewrite First Chapter for the History of Medicine from The New York Times. It is important to keep in mind that this is evidence of the first recorded use of a medicinal plant, as plants were likely used medicinally for millenia prior to the construction of this fresco - especially since it seems modern day chimpanzees use medicinal plants:

Chemo-ethology of Hominoid Interactions with Medicinal Plants and Parasites. It is interesting to note that this site references work by Dr. Neil Towers of the UBC Department of Botany and UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research.

Link discovered from Mirabilis.ca weblog.

Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 11:47 PM on March 3, 2004

Want to talk about this weblog entry? As of August 22, 2006, all new entries and most older entries are cross-posted to the UBC Botanical Garden Discussion Forums for discussion (you might need to use the search function to find the thread you are looking for).

This is an effort to reduce the amount of time spent dealing with spam (the forums are very good at stopping spam, the weblog commenting system is not so good).

Older entries already containing comments remain open for discussion.