After the boom of pharmacological research during the 1950s, mainly as a result of the screening technique, the identification of active molecules, their reshaping by means of pharmaco-chemical drug design, and the creation of extremely efficacious and successful medicines, the pharmaceutical world sought a new source of inspiration. Such biota as the tropical forest, a quantity of plants credited with highly powerful therapeutic activity, seemed to be a resource.As a sort of shortcut, research began interviewing the individuals who, in pre-modern societies, retained the secret of the herbs. Ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology, interested in the traditional knowledge and therapeutic uses of plants of human groups not yet entered into modernity, had hopes that the practice of plants coming from the dawn of Humankind and handled down from one generation to another, one century to another, and one culture from another, and now detained by a handful of healers qualified as traditional by Western medicine, could not only provide the modern world with a cure, if not a prevention to its sores, but also reconnect modern and post-modern societies with their roots and their environment. The recipes and therapeutic arsenal of a wide range of non-Western or non-Westernized cultures were scrutinized. The results of that large-scale enterprise were published worldwide and also stored in such a powerful tool for research as the NAPRALERT database, which can be consulted through the Internet.