About the books
Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera published Plantas medicinales de Filipinas in Madrid in 1892. Jerome B. Thomas Jr., a captain and assistant surgeon with the United States Volunteers, translated and revised it as The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines, printed in Philadelphia by P. Blakiston's Son & Co. in 1901.
What Pardo de Tavera set down
Pardo de Tavera was a Filipino physician trained in Paris. For each plant he gives the names used in Tagalog, Visayan, Ilocano, Pampango and Spanish, how healers and doctors used it, a dose where he had one, a botanical description, and where it grew. Thomas added English names, plant sizes and flower colours for army medical officers posted to small stations across the islands.
The book covers 217 plants. Read the full text on Project Gutenberg or page through the scan at the Internet Archive.
The second book: Healing Wonders of Herbs
Herminia de Guzman-Ladion, a nurse and physical therapist, wrote Healing Wonders of Herbs: Guide to the Effective Use of Medicinal Plants for households. Philippine Publishing House in Manila printed it in 1985. It pairs water treatments with plant remedies for some forty everyday complaints, from abscesses to worms, then shows 74 plants one to a page with a photograph, the scientific name and the names used in Tagalog, Ilocano, Visayan, Bicol and Pampango.
43 of those plants are also in the 1901 book, and their pages here carry both accounts. The other 31 have pages of their own. Three plants the remedies call for, tagulinaw, malabulak and lumbang bato, have no plant page in the book and are left out.
The book is still in copyright. Its entries here are a summary written for this site: which ailment each plant is used for, which part, in what form, and the amounts and doses the book gives, with the page number. All of it is reworded. The book's own text and its photographs are not reproduced. Where the scan is too faint to read an amount, the entry says less instead of guessing. Names are given as printed, misprints included, beside the accepted name.
Filtering by ailment
The home page can narrow the list to plants used for one group of ailments: fever, cough and asthma, mouth, teeth and throat, diarrhea and dysentery, stomach and digestion, constipation, worms, skin, wounds, burns and boils, joint pain, sprains and swelling, headache and fainting, urinary, hemorrhoids, bites and stings, hair and scalp, menstruation and childbirth, eyes and ears. For the 1985 book the groups follow its chapters, so athlete's foot, eczema and ringworm all fall under skin. The 1901 book has no such chapters, so a script looks through each plant's “Uses” text for the words of that time, such as febrifuge, anthelmintic or emmenagogue. A match means the book mentions the ailment in that entry. It can catch a passing remark, and it can miss a use described in other words, so read the entry itself before relying on a tag.
How this directory was put together
The book's text comes from the Project Gutenberg transcription, split into one entry per plant by a script. Nothing in the quoted passages has been reworded. Where the book describes two or three species in a single account, each of their pages carries that account.
Botanical names have moved a long way since 1901. 110 of the 217 entries carry a different accepted name today, and each page shows both the name as printed and the modern one. Some of the book's identifications were wrong for the Philippine plant, usually because a name from Indian botany was applied to a local species. Those pages carry a note.
Modern names, colours and native ranges were compiled by hand and checked against the GBIF backbone taxonomy. Photos are the lead image of each species' English Wikipedia article, or the image on its Wikidata record, with the photographer and licence read from Wikimedia Commons. Where Commons has nothing, the page uses an openly licensed photo from iNaturalist. For the 3 species with neither, it shows a pressed specimen from the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, taken from Plants of the World Online.
Research links come from Europe PMC, fetched in October 2026. For each plant the script asks for papers since 2022 with the species name in the title, pooling older synonyms still used in journals, and keeps the three with the most citations. If none exist it widens the search to 2018, then to abstracts. The list shows what researchers are studying. It does not vouch for any result.
Modern descriptions and Philippine records
Each page carries a short modern description. It is the first few sentences of the plant's English Wikipedia article and, for the 85 plants that have one, of its Tagalog Wikipedia article, quoted under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence and linked to the full article. 8 species have no English article, so their pages quote the summary line from Kew's Plants of the World Online.
The list of provinces comes from GBIF, which pools herbarium specimens and field observations. The script counts each plant's Philippine records by province. The counts follow where people have collected and photographed plants, so a common garden herb can show fewer records than a rare forest tree, and 18 plants in the book have no Philippine records at all.
Reading the old spellings
Pardo de Tavera used his own orthography for Philippine languages. His g̃ is the sound now written ng, so Malug̃ay is malunggay and Bawag̃ is bawang. He writes k and w where Spanish spelling of the time used c, qu and u.
- Tag.
- Tagalog
- Vis.
- Visayan
- Pam.
- Pampango
- Iloc.
- Ilocano
- Bic.
- Bicol
- Pan.
- Pangasinan
- Sp.
- Spanish
- Sp.-Fil.
- Spanish as used in the Philippines
- Eng.
- English
- Indo-Eng.
- English as used in India
Sizes in the botanical descriptions use the marks ° and ′, which read as feet and inches. The book does not explain them.
Plants the book could not name
For ten plants Pardo de Tavera wrote a question mark or "not known" where the Philippine name should be. Those pages add names from two later references: StuartXchange, Dr. Godofredo Stuart's compilation of Philippine medicinal plants, and PROSEA, the Plant Resources of South-East Asia handbooks. Five of the ten have names there. For the other five, PROSEA lists names from neighbouring countries but none from the Philippines.
A caution
The remedies belong to the medicine of the 1890s and the home practice of the 1980s. The 1901 book recommends plants now known to be dangerous, among them St. Ignatius bean, croton, yellow oleander and rosary pea, and its doses were written for physicians of that time. The 1985 book has dried talumpunay and kalatsutsi leaves smoked for asthma and puts oleander on the skin, all of which carry real risk. Treat both texts as history.
Corrections
The data and build scripts are in the GitHub repository. If a name, colour, photo or range is wrong, open an issue.