Plants have been a plentiful source of useful drugs and remedies throughout human history. In the early nineteenth century Friedrich Sertürner isolated morphine from the opium plant. By 1827, morphine was marketed by Merck in Germany and the origins of the modern pharmaceutical industry began. Over the remainder of the nineteenth century further advances in organic chemistry led to identification of other drugs from plant material. Examples of important medicines developed from plants included quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree for the treatment of malaria and salicylic acid from the willow tree that eventually led to the development of aspirin (Anderson, 2005).