More than 100 years ago, eager young pharmacy students cultivated medicinal plants for the purpose of analyzing and studying their pharmaceutical properties. Now those same plants serve a different purpose.
Just outside the Pharmacy building sits a little garden that almost looks like it’s part of the landscaping. But this garden isn’t just meant to be aesthetically pleasing. Instead, it’s meant to signify a connection to the original botanically-focused foundation of pharmaceutical studies.
While medicinal plants in gardens may have been used for students to study in the past, today’s medicinal gardens like University of Wisconsin’s showcase medicinal plants that have become commercial products, former UW School of Pharmacy Dean Jeanette Roberts said.
The garden signifies much older days of studying medicinal plants, Roberts said.
“The history of pharmacy is in large part linked to medicinal plants, we wanted to honor that history as well as provide a teaching tool for students about that history,” Roberts said.
Some of the plants that may be seen displayed in the garden include prescription drugs, and others are plants that may fall under the dietary supplement category like black cohosh, Roberts said.
These days, the garden provides a way to give students a chance to understand and investigate the history of pharmacy and these plant’s uses in the past, Gregory Higby, executive director of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, said.
Students may investigate the history of the plants and understand their purpose, Higby said. Some of the projects students have been working on in the pharmacy school also deal with natural products, he said.
Higby said students can use these medicinal plants to compare herbal remedies to prescription drugs.
“One student came up with a guide to herbal remedies that was completely in Spanish and gave it out for free,” Higby said. “It’s important to have a guide like this to know how herbal remedies and prescription drugs may affect one another.”
Previously, pharmacy students used to actually conduct studies of medicinal plants as a mandatory part of their education.
About 125 years ago, students collected medicinal plants from the wild and would study them to make sure they knew what they looked like, Higby said. Students would also often use these plants in experiments to make fluid extracts, as well as view slices of the plants under microscopes.

Courtesy of Gregory Higby
But over the years, pharmacy schools shifted from studying these medicinal plants to studying more pharmaceutical drugs. Only a few medicinal plants remain relevant and important to studies conducted today, Higby said.
“The transition away from these kinds of drugs started about 100 years ago, then really picked up speed in the 1930s,” Higby said. “By the ’40s, there are very few medicinal plants that are used anymore and after World War II, [students] pretty much stopped learning this.”
Though times have changed and pharmacy studies have shifted away from studying medicinal plants, around 12 plants still continue to be important in today’s research, offering a glimpse of what once was the focus of pharmacy studies.