Monkeys, the first doctors! - Part 1

Dear readers, This time I would like to write up on an interesting topic which was reported by the famous, Roger Highfield. In his one of articles he was saying that monkeys were the first doctors and pharmacists! Evidence has emerged that humans learned the medicinal properties of soil and plants from fellow primates.

When we look back at the history of medicine, we think of the clever people who have, over thousands of years, devised the methods to reduce the human suffering. But to find the real fathers of the healing arts, we should look millions of years further back - to our hairy relatives i.e the apes.

The standard account of medicine says that Hippocrates (460-370BC) introduced reason to treatment. The first pharmacopoeia, De Materia Medica - a list of 600 drugs - is attributed to Dioscorides in AD65. And the "father of pharmacy" was another Greek, Claudius Galenus, who became surgeon to the gladiators in second-century Rome. Recently, research by a team from the University of Manchester, led by Prof Rosalie David, put back the birth of medicine by another millennium claimed that the pioneers of the healing arts were not the ancient Greeks but the ancient Egyptians.

Egyptian doctors treated wounds with honey, resins and metals which are now known to have antimicrobial action. For constipation, they used laxatives of castor oil, colocynth (a bitter fruit), figs and bran. For indigestion, they prescribed an antacid of powdered limestone (calcium carbonate), while we take magnesium carbonate. Cumin and coriander were used to relieve flatulence, celery and saffron for rheumatism, and pomegranate to eradicate tapeworms.

 Now, the textbooks may have to be rewritten again - because evidence is emerging that medicine is not a human invention at all. An example is the deliberate ingestion of soil, known as "geophagy". In people, it is thought to signal mental health problems. But according to a study of chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park in Uganda, it turns out to be a remedy. Consuming a particular kind of soil, as some scientists in Paris reported recently in the journal Naturwissenschaften, increases the potency of ingested plants, such as the leaves of Trichilia rubescens, which have anti-malarial properties.

The team collected earth eaten by chimpanzees, as well as leaves from young T. rubescens trees in the same area. All the soil was rich in the clay mineral kaolinite, the principal component of many anti-diarrhoea medicines. Clays can bind mycotoxins (fungal toxins), endotoxins (internal toxins secreted by pathogens), man-made toxic chemicals, bacteria and viruses. They also act as an antacid and absorb excess fluids. The scientists replicated the effects of mastication, gastric and intestinal digestion in the laboratory and were surprised. Before being mixed with the soil, the digested leaves had no significant effects. However, when the leaves and soil were digested together, the mixture developed clear anti-malarial properties. So, actually the medicine was prepared by the chimpanzees by mixing the leaves and the soil!