The archives of Flora Medicinal, an ancient pharmaceutical laboratory that supported ethnomedical …

• Abstract
• Background
• Materials and methods
• Results
• Discussion
• References
• Table 1

Biology Articles » Ethnobiology » Plants used traditionally to treat malaria in Brazil: the archives of Flora Medicinal » Materials and methods

Materials and methods

- Plants used traditionally to treat malaria in Brazil: the archives of Flora Medicinal

All documents, including books, hand notes, unpublished studies and the issues of Revista da Flora Medicinal, belonging to the library of Mr. Monteiro da Silva, were examined for information about botanical therapies and plant species used for malaria. Any data or references to plants used for malaria were carefully inserted into a template, and botanical name and classification were re-examined and confirmed with four major plant databases – The Missouri Botanical Garden's VAST[7], the International Plant Names Index[8], the New York Botanical Garden vascular plants database[9] and the Brazilian's Northeast Plants Database[10]. Other information existing in modern databases such as Pubmed (U.S. National Library of Medicine's database that is searchable on the Web) were also examined and compared to other ethnopharmacological studies and current published data.

A review of plants with possible antimalarial activity reported in ethnomedical studies or in pharmacological and biochemical research was also made [11-31].