Medicinal plant use plays an important role in the healthcare of many South Africans. Furthermore, in orthodox
medicine, conventional antimicrobial agents are amongst themost commonly prescribed groups of drugs. Therefore,
due to the prevalence of use of these two forms of healthcare, there is a high probability for their concurrent
This paper reviews the antimicrobial research undertaken on South African medicinal plants during the period 1997–2008. Antimicrobial methods (disc diffusion, minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC), bioautography) are briefly discussed and an analysis of the publications reviewed indicates that the majority of papers use MIC assays for antimicrobial determination.