European Naturalists and Medicinal Plants of Brazil

Plants have been used as a food and medicinal source in the Americas for a long time. Historical registers demonstrate that Amerindians used avocado (Persea americana L.), sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.), mate (Ilex paraguariensis A. St.-Hil.) and cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) 10,000 years ago (Wolters, 1992). The Portuguese and Spanish brought several of these species to Europe at the beginning of the 16th century. There, they began to investigate the native beliefs about disease and the plants that cured them. The use of Brazilian plant remedies, such as copaiba (Copaifera spp.), jaborandi (Pilocarpus spp.), ipecacuanha (Psychotria ipecacuanha (Brot.) Stokes) and curares (Chondodendron spp.), have expanded to several parts of the world. In addition to the dissemination of knowledge, the plant remedies themselves were transported in great quantity (Ferrao, 2004). Medicinal plants are widely used in both rural and urban areas of Brazil. However, the intense miscegenation of cultures over the last centuries has popularized the use of exotic and imported plants in medicine. Most plants are used according to folk tradition, which was brought to the country by Europeans and Africans, popularizing European than indigenous medicine. Moreover, the growth of the pharmaceutical industry in Brazil during the second half of the 20th century markedly changed traditional Brazilian medicine. Brazil’s native vegetation is continuously suffering destruction in consequence of different economic cycles (Machado & Figueroa, 2001). The first economic cycle in Brazil was due to the exploitation of redwood ("pau-brasil") along the coast by the Portuguese since the discovery of the country, lasting over 50 years. The wood of this species provides a deep red color, which was much used at the time to dye cloth, and more recently the only true wood for violins bows. In the second half of the 16th century the sugarcane plantations started, indicating that Portugal was really motivated to settle Brazil. For a period exceeding 150 years, sugar production accounted for almost the sole basis of the Brazilian economy. Actually, in the middle of the 17th century Brazil was the world's largest sugar producer, and at that time the first competitors started their production in Central America and the Caribbean. The third economic cycle is more or less simultaneous with the sugarcane cycle