The origins of Western herbal medicines for kidney diseases.

This article gathers the data on the plants used for the treatment of pathologies of kidneys and the urinary tract from the most ancient medical texts of classical antiquity, the Corpus Hippocraticum , the Aristotelian Problems , and De Materia Medica by Dioscorides. If hippocratic information is scant and practical, aristotelian are of a more theoretical nature and propose an explanation of the action of drugs on the urinary tract. De Materia Medica , coming after a possible research activity in the Alexandrian School, reports the action of many drugs. The work had a deep influence on the subsequent centuries, up to the birth of modern pharmacochemistry.