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[[File:Herbsflowers.jpg|thumb|350px|left|Medicinal herbs]]

Herbal medicine -- also called botanical medicine or phytomedicine -- refers to using a plant's seeds, berries, roots, leaves, bark, or flowers for medicinal purposes. Herbalism has a long tradition of use outside of conventional medicine. It is becoming more mainstream as improvements in analysis and quality control along with advances in clinical research show the value of herbal medicine in the treating and preventing disease.

In the written record, the study of herbs dates back over 5,000 years to the Sumerians, who created clay tablets with lists of hundreds of medicinal plants. The largest surviving such medical treatise from ancient Mesopotamia is known as "Treatise of Medical Diagnosis and Prognoses." The text of this treatise consists of 40 tablets collected and studied by the French scholar R. Labat. Although the oldest surviving copy of this treatise dates to around 1,600 BC, the information contained in the text is an amalgamation of several centuries of Mesopotamian medical knowledge. It has been shown that the plants used in treatment were generally used to treat the symptoms of the disease, and were not the sorts of things generally given for magical purposes. The same plants were used then as are today. At the same time in Egypt, (c. 1,500 BC), the Ancient Egyptians wrote the Ebers Papyrus (right) which contains information on over 850 plant medicines, including garlic, juniper, cannabis, aloe, and mandrake.<br>

In India, the Rig-Veda a sacred Hindu text lists herbal medicines and created the Ayurvedic health care system in this Asia country. Ancient China has its own list of herbal medicines compiled in the Pun-tsao text, written in the 1600s. In the New World, the Aztecs wrote texts on herbal medicines derived from their knowledge of plants they had discovered to have medicinal qualities. The Badianus Manuscripts were written in 1592 by the Aztec Martinus de la Cruz for King Charles I of Spain.<br>