Pharmacognosy is the learning of medicines from natural sources.

Originally - during the 19th century and the opening of the 20th century - the term was used to define the bough of the medicine or even of the commodity sciences, which dealt with medicines in their basic, or unprepared, form.

As "crude drug" it is in fact to be meant here a dried untrained natural material, which is used in the medicine.

The word "Pharmacognosy" derives in detail from the Greek words pharmakon (drug), and gnosis or information.

The word "Pharmakognosie" represented for years in the German speaking area - where this term was born and the regulation had and still has its lynch-pin - a synonym of "Drogenkunde".

Pharmacognosy is meant today as a division of the pharmacy, which has its focus on medicines from usual sources and whose scope is the identification or verification of crude drugs using macroscopical, microscopical, or chemical methods.

It can include nowadays the learning of the botany, ethno botany, chemistry, pharmacology, and clinical pharmacy of crude drugs, and the majority of the pharmacognostic studies are normally focused on medicinal plants/herbal medicines.

In a little academic context, the term has been artificially extended to cover also the study of pure, isolated substances of normal origin as well as the search for new drugs from natural sources.

Although today pharmacognosy is taught in extremely few pharmacy schools in the US and UK, the subject is still compulsory within most pharmacy curricula in continental European universities.