The first modern drug for high blood pressure
AI-drafted · awaiting admin review
Did Indian doctors bring sarpagandha (Rauwolfia) into modern medicine as a blood pressure drug before the West?
Indian contribution, later developed elsewhereMedicine & health
Indian claim
Sarpagandha (Rauwolfia serpentina), long used in India for mental illness and snakebite, was shown by Ganapath Sen and Kartick Chandra Bose in Calcutta in 1931 to lower blood pressure. Dr Rustom Jal Vakil of Bombay published decisive clinical results in the British Heart Journal in 1949.
Evidence for the Indian claim
- Sen and Bose's 1931 paper in the Indian Medical World is the first modern therapeutic study of the root, and R.N. Chopra's indigenous drugs inquiry studied its alkaloids in the 1930s and 1940s.
- Vakil's 1949 paper summed up about ten years of clinical work and introduced the drug to Western doctors. He later received the Lasker Award (1957).
Commonly credited to
Scientists at the Swiss company Ciba isolated the active substance, reserpine, in 1952 and it became one of the first widely used blood pressure and psychiatric drugs.
Evidence for the other claim
- Isolating and manufacturing pure reserpine was done in Switzerland, and much of the later research took place in Europe and the US.
What historians and scientists say
Indian traditional medicine supplied the plant and Indian doctors gave the first scientific proof that it lowers blood pressure. Western chemists isolated reserpine and made it a global drug.