[The basis and goals of the pharmacy profession--pharmacobotany and its contribution to the development of drugs].

Pharmacy is one of very comprehensive and complex fields of human activity; the interrelationships of its individual principal disciplines did not always develop synergically in the course of time. At present, when the field commemorates important anniversaries and develops in the period of new social changes, it is necessary to contemplate the development of the individual fields and their balances in the principal entity for the pharmacist--the medicament. The historiography of the field unambiguously points at the cardinal position of classic pharmacognosy in this process, showing its development, separation of pharmacology, the relationship of pharmacognosy to pharmaceutical chemistry, the differences between the two disciplines and the origin of galenical pharmacy, or the not very fortunate concept of biopharmaceutics. This process takes place in the picture of the dialectical unity of the principal pharmaceutical categories: the drug--the pharmaceutical preparation--the medicament. The development of pharmacobotany as a practical complex discipline originated from pharmacognosy shows in a graphic way the development of the discipline "an sich" into the entity "für sich" and suggests the approach of the pharmacist to the phenomenon of the medicament from the historiographical viewpoint.