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Materia Medica, Pharmacology & Bio-Prospecting

Plantago attenuata (aka Plantago lanceolata)

This is an image of Plantago attenuata, better known as Plantago lanceolata. The plant was collected and depicted by Nathaniel Wallich within the territory of the East India Company in 1828 when he was working as a superintendent at the Company’s Botanic Garden. This image is now part of the Wallich Collection in the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew in England. It is categorized as Plantago attenuata (48) - 1828 East India Company, The Wallich Collection, Kew.

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1. Plantago attenuata (aka Plantago lanceolata) This is an image of Plantago attenuata, better known as Plantago lanceolata. The plant was collected and depicted by Nathaniel Wallich within the territory of the East India Company in 1828 when he was working as a superintendent at the Company’s Botanic Garden. This image is now part of the Wallich Collection in the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew in England. It is categorized as Plantago attenuata (48) - 1828 East India Company, The Wallich Collection, Kew.
Contents of this annotation:
1. Plantago attenuata (aka Plantago lanceolata) This is an image of Plantago attenuata, better known as Plantago lanceolata. The plant was collected and depicted by Nathaniel Wallich within the territory of the East India Company in 1828 when he was working as a superintendent at the Company’s Botanic Garden. This image is now part of the Wallich Collection in the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew in England. It is categorized as Plantago attenuata (48) - 1828 East India Company, The Wallich Collection, Kew.
Contents of this annotation:
1. Plantago attenuata (aka Plantago lanceolata) This is an image of Plantago attenuata, better known as Plantago lanceolata. The plant was collected and depicted by Nathaniel Wallich within the territory of the East India Company in 1828 when he was working as a superintendent at the Company’s Botanic Garden. This image is now part of the Wallich Collection in the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew in England. It is categorized as Plantago attenuata (48) - 1828 East India Company, The Wallich Collection, Kew.

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Kew Gardens Plantago attenuata
This image comes from the Wallich Collection, the largest separate herbarium collection at Kew by Danish-born botanist Nathaniel Wallich. He was the superintendent at the East India Company’s (EIC) Botanic Garden at Sibpur near Calcutta in 1815. The Wallich Collection comprised of Wallich’s collections from India, Nepal, and Malaysia as well as plants growing from the Calcutta Botanic Garden and from collectors from the East India Company territories. His work is known as possibly the most extensive and influential distribution of Asian and Southeast Asian botanical material (Watson 2013, 1-4).

This image shows a typical full plant with leaves, stalks, and roots, and it also displays one isolated stalk and isolated flowers in three different stages of development. Wallich used an abundance of new plant names while making his catalog. This was most impactful to Asian botany in terms of naming for Asian plants. As it was often the first time many hundred of these Asian plants received published names (Watson 2013, 1-4). The name on the image says “Plantago attenuata Wall.” which indicates that the botanical name Plantago attenuata was created by Wallich; as “Wall.” is used as a standard author abbreviation to indicate Wallich as the person who validly published the botanical name (Majumdar and Banerjee 1976, 415 -417). Though since Kew Gardens listed this image under Plantago lanceolata, it is clear that the name made by Wallich did not continue in use and is known as an alternative name for Plantago lanceolata, as a commonly accepted species.

The plants from the Wallich Collection do not use description but Kew uses Flora Zambesiaca to describe Plantago lanceolata as: “a perennial herb, extremely variable glabrous, pubescent, or more rarely dense pilose, growing from a more or less erect stout short rhizome; roots terete, 0.1-75mm in diam.; stem serious” (Lehmann 1988, 9). Flora of Tropical East Africa describes Plantago lanceolata as: “[a]n extremely variable glabrous, pubescent or more rarely densely pilose perennial herb from a ± erect, thick, short rhizome; stem silky hairy” (Verdcourt 1971, 1-7). Both sources seem to give a very similar description, suggesting that the plant is uniform in appearance. Though if the descriptions were a bit different it could be simply coming from a regional variety or perhaps if the authors focused on different aspects.

WORKS CITED
Gordon, Bernard de. 1296. Lilium medicinae.Translated by Connelly, Erin. 2016. "Lylye of Medicynes: An Edition of the Fifteenth-century Translation of Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicinae." PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Kew Gardens. n.d. “Plantago lanceolata L.” Plants of the World Online. Accessed May 31, 2021. http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:321285-2.
Lehmann, G. 1988. “Plantaginaceae.” Flora Zambesiaca Vol. 9, Part 1: 9.
Majumdar, N. C., and R. N. Banerjee. 1976. “A Note on the Citation of a Wallichian Specimen.” Bulletin Du Jardin Botanique National de Belgique 46 (3/4): 415–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/3667725.
Verdcourt, B. 1971. “Plantaginaceae.” In Flora of Tropical East Africa, edited by E. Milne-Redhead and R. M. Polhill, 1-7. London: Crown Agents.
Watson, Mark. 2013. “The Wallich Catalogue Project.” Botanics Stories (blog). February 21, 2013. https://stories.rbge.org.uk/archives/865.
The Importance of Plantago in Medieval European Medicine The historical study of Plantago in European Materia Medica has played a significant role in bioprospecting. Bioprospecting is defined as the search for materials including plants, animals, or other “commercially valuable” substances. The discovery of Plantago has set the stage for current bioprospecting inquiries because learning how tangible products from our environment may be used to treat individuals changed how medicine is viewed and even procured. Natural remedies retrieved directly from our surroundings are useful in treatment without the addition of complex strategies to process synthetic material in producing a desired result.

In particular, antibiotic resistance has become a growing issue in medicine. Some infections are extremely difficult to treat with current drugs, and research on new antibiotics has not caught up to the number of resistant cases. Thus, the significance of looking at historical uses of Plantago is that herbal treatments may be a possible solution for cases of antibiotic-resistant infections. Historical studies of Plantago in European Materia Medica have focused on several species of Plantago for a range of medicinal treatments. By focusing future bioprospecting efforts on Plantago, a natural remedy for infections and injuries, the way we approach medicine may drastically change.

The genus of Plantago is studied because of its long history and present use in herbal medicine. In Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicinae, various species of Plantago were used for different ailments such as: wounds, skins infections, general oral diseases, abscesses in the gums, burns, nail infections, nosebleeds, digestive complaints diarrhea, liver problems, ruptured cornea, respiratory conditions, committing blood, kidney stones, and blood in the urine. It was even called a cure-all by Pedanius Dioscorides and many others. The “Nine Herbs Charm'' in the Lacnunga calls Plantago the “mother of herbs.” There are 240 different species under the genus of Plantago but this project mainly focused on Plantago major and Plantago lanceolata as those are the two species that are particularly active in the literature.

Current scholarship focusing on Lilium medicinae has discovered the medicinal Plantago major and Plantago lanceolata, and some of the earliest herbal collections also focused on Plantago major and Plantago minor (later was also called Plantago media, but is the species of Plantago lanceolata, which is different from the accepted species of Plantago media today). For instance, sources such as Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica (50-70 CE), Leonhart Fuchs’ De Historia Stirpium, 1542), and later translations and commentaries of De Materia Medica all refer to Plantago major and Plantago minor. Other anecdotal references mention the Plantago species as a whole or by common names, such as waybroad and hoary plantain.

However, further research should be performed on the other species of Plantago. Since the two main species are highly useful in treating a variety of injuries and illnesses, the accepted species Plantago media may also have medicinal uses according to this recent research, more studies should be done to examine the medicinal properties of the remaining species under the genus of Plantago. Future research could also investigate the best method of extracting aucubin from Plantago leaves, as it is the main active compound in Plantago for its antibiotic activity. Additional testing can also be conducted on the Plantago species in combination with modern treatments as a potential solution for antibiotic resistance to increase effectiveness against novel illnesses.
WORKS CITED
Connelly, Erin. 2018. “A Case Study of Plantago in the Treatment of Infected Wounds in the Middle English Translation of Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicinae.” New Approaches to Disease, Disability and Medicine in Medieval Europe, 126-140. Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology.

Dioscorides, Pedanius. 1555. De Materia Medica. Translated by Andrés de Laguna. From World Digital Library: https://www.wdl.org/en/item/10632/.

Fierascu, R. C., Fierascu, I., Ortan, A., & Paunescu, A. (2021). Plantago media L.-Explored and Potential Applications of an Underutilized Plant. Plants (Basel, Switzerland), 10(2) :, 265. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants10020265

Fuchs, Leonhart. 1542. “De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes: Maximis Impensis Et Uigiliis Elaborati, Adiectis Earundem Uiuis Plusquam Quingentis....” University of Cambridge Digital Library. Accessed June 1, 2021. https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-SEL-00002-00081/347.
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