A review of the antimicrobial potential of herbal drugs used in popular Italian medicine (1850s-1950s) to treat bacterial skin diseases

摘要

Ethnopharmacological relevance: Before the advent of modern antibiotics, microbial infections were treated with herbal medicine or cauterization. Literature from the latter half of the nineteenth to the early mid-twentieth century, when antibiotics became widely available, arguably holds the most progressive information about herbal remedies to treat bacterial skin diseases. The corpus of literature produced in Italy during that period is not easily accessible and mostly out of print.