Modern Medicines from Plants: Botanical histories of some of modern medicine’s most important drugs

Author Biography

Henry Oakeley is a retired consultant psychiatrist who has been interested in plants since the age of eight and an international authority on a group of South American orchids, on which he has written the definitive monograph and held the UK National Collections. Sometime adviser to the Chelsea Physic Garden, Honorary Research Associate at Kew and Singapore Botanic Gardens; chairman of the RHS Orchid Committee, RHS Council Member and currently RHS Vice President. He has lectured on orchids and exhibited them around the world; written over 250 articles on orchids and written (or co-authored) ten books relating to plants and their uses, and others on the English Civil War, the Anglo Boer war, and medical biographies. Since 2005 he has been Garden Fellow at the Royal College of Physicians, London where he lectures on the plants in the Medicinal Garden. His orchid herbarium and drawings have been deposited at Kew, and his medicinal plant and orchid photographic archives at Kew and elsewhere. His current interest is in documenting the change of use of medicinal plants over the past two millennia. Anthony Dayan was Professor of Toxicology in the University of London at Queen Mary University, London. He has been involved with the development and regulation of drugs and the safety of consumer products for more than 40 years in universities, official agencies in many countries and in the pharmaceutical industry. He has been Chairman of the British Toxicology Society and in 2014 the American College of Toxicology elected him Distinguished Scientist of the Year. He has been a Garden Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians since 2014, a co-author of A Garden of Medicinal Plants [50 plants in the College Garden from the history of Medicine]. He catalogued the Pharmaceutical Society Herbarium at the College with Professor Michael de Swiet. He has a particular interest in the historical aspects of the dual use of certain plants as foods and medicines. He has lectured to many University of the Third Age (U3A) groups and other organisations on toxic risks and on plants and medicines.