After thousands of years and not far from our time, the
study on fungi has increased and evolved fast, so great was the
importance of their interaction with man. Hence, Mycology aris-
es conceptually, as the specific science that studies all that is
related to fungi.
We dare to consider the above mentioned Brazilian fos-
sil of 120 million years old as the cornerstone, literally, of the
origin of the mycological studies, initiating a brief history of the
fungi and mycology. Because of their microscopic form, most
of the time, they were not known as today, except when they
expressed their presence through macroscopic fruiting bodies,
such as mushrooms and Bracket fungi. For this reason, these
structures, which are nothing more than fruiting fungi, were
used by different cultures as food, medicines, “religious” rituals,
as well as hallucinogens (5).
In a didactic approach, three to four basic periods are
suggested in which phytopathology could be delineated, where
the earliest is the Mystic period, followed by the Predisposition
period and, subsequently, by the Etiological period(6). In each
of them, advances in knowledge about fungi and the develop-
ment of humanity could be expressed in the various branches
of knowledge, influencing art, politics, medicine, agriculture and
the sciences in a general way.
The Mystical period, around 750 b.C. until the early of
nineteenth century, was the one where plant diseases were at-
tributed to divine punishments of gods or God to men, trans-
lated into the form of plagues and diseases that plagued the
plantations and, consequently, the entire population. Some of
these reports may be read in the Old Testament, as said by the
prophet Amos:
“I smote you with burn, and with rust; the multitude of
your gardens, and of your vines, and of your fig trees, and of your
olive trees, shall eat the locust; yet have ye not returned unto me,
said the Lord” (7).
In ancient Rome there were innumerable celebrations,
among them “Robigalia”, in which dogs, cows, and other red-
furred animals were sacrificed as offerings to Robigus and Ro-
bigo, a couple of deities believed to be gods who could rid the
crops of the wheat rust(8), desease caused by fungi, which pro-
duced pustules containing orange-colored spores and, when
they occurred in cereal crops, decreased or made the grain pro-
duction and harvesting unviable.
Although the vision at that time was mystical, the un-
derstanding was based on the theory of spontaneous genera-
tion and perpetuity of species supported by the botanist, zool-
ogist and physician Carl von Linné or Carolus Linnaeus, known
as Linnaeus, passionate about species ordering who ended up
proposing his system of classification and binomial nomencla-
ture. This proposal brought together and grouped living beings,
giving a single valid, universal name for each species of living
being, the scientific name, composed of Gender and Species.
Even so, diverse ideas about fungi in plants were speculated and
discussed at that time, including views of scholars who attribut-
ed the diseases of cereals to some fungi.Amid the turbulence that emerged in the scientific milieu,
due to the new discoveries, the period of Predisposition was
marked by a process of transition, short and highly important
for mycology. However, the presence of fungi was associated
as consequence of diseases, i.e., frequent detection of fungi in
lesions of diseased plants. Thus, from the early nineteenth cen-
tury, around 1853, there was a considerable increase in the in-
terest of botanists and mycologists by these associations, pro-
viding an expansion of cataloguing works published on fungi.
However, it was still believed that due to nutritional weaknesses
or environmental factors, which the plants were subjected to,
fungi appeared in the plants by spontaneous generation.Finally, in 1853 the Etiological period, as the name itself,
was the one whose origin of the diseases was finally attributed
to the microorganisms, among them fungi. In one of the earli-
est papers published on this discovery, Heinrich Anton de Bary
found that Phytophthora infestans, considered a fungus at that
time, was the causative agent of the potato late blight (9), a dev-
astating crop disease even at the present. This microorganism
has been classified in the Chromista Kingdom (5) and not in the
Fungi Kingdom.In this Etiological period, the pioneering works of Louis
Pasteur in 1860 on the bacterial origin of diseases in humans
and animals also disproved the theory of spontaneous gener-
ation. The establishment of Koch Postulates by Heinrich Her-
mann Robert Koch in 1881 enabled the use of a protocol to de-
termine whether a specific microorganism could be considered
a pathogen.Subsequent periods will continue to be defined hereafter,
such as the Ecological and Biotechnological period proposed
for the contemporary era (10), and the history of fungi among us
will be better defined and understood in the future.Numerous facts and events that have built the intimate
relationship between humans and fungi strengthened this as-
sociation, either directly or indirectly, turning our attention more
and more to the knowledge, understanding, utilization and con-
trol of fungi, and among these events we can mention some
ones in chronological order, as follows: