The people of North and South America also used medicinal herbs. Over thousands of years, the people of North and South Americas accumulated a vast store of botanical and medical knowledge, a fact that surprised many European explorers in the sixteenth century.
The Aztecs may have had as many as 3,000 different medicinal herbs. In 1552, two Native American students at the College of Santa Cruz in Tlaltilulco, Martinus de la Cruz and Juannes Badianus, compiled a list of herbs that had been used as medicines for centuries by the Aztecs. Martinus wrote, and probably illustrated, the original Aztec text, and Badianus translated the work into Latin. The Badianus Manuscript is the oldest known American herbal.