Intro to Medical Ethnobotany

Why Ethnobotany and Not Ethnozoology?

• Primary production – biomass• We literally ARE what we eat and plants are

ultimately our energy source• Plants are immobile – they can’t run away from

consumers or move to avoid inhospitable conditions; they also can’t move to carry out reproductive activities

• So, plants produce a vast array of secondary chemicals for activities such as defense, protection, pollinator attraction, and seed dispersal

Why study people living a more traditional lifestyle?

• People tend to have a more intimate connection with the plants they use – they know where their food was grown, what plant it comes from, etc.

• People typically have been in the same area for long enough to know their local plants and their properties

Carl Linnaeus & Botanical Nomenclature

• In 1753, Linnaeus proposed a standard way to form scientific names (in Species Plantarum)

• Introduced ranks (e.g., family...genus...species) and binomial species names

• A form of this system is still in use today

Carl Linnaeus & the Sexual System

Linnaeus & Ethnobotany

• Before the scandal...• In 1732, Linnaeus

traveled alone to Lapland (in N. Finland)

• There, he lived among the Sami people for many months, learning their language and culture and documenting their use of plants

William Withering 1785 - An Account of the Foxglove and Some of Its Medical Uses.

digoxin

digitoxin

Richard Evan Schultes and Modern Ethnobotany

• As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1930s, Schultes chose to write about the peyote cactus for his senior thesis – he traveled to Oklahoma in 1937 to study with the Kiowa Indians and learn about their ceremonial use of this cactus

• Schultes’ doctoral research took him to Mexico, where he documented the use of the sacred mushroom of the Aztecs, Teonanacatl, for the first time

Richard Evan Schultes and Modern Ethnobotany

• After receiving his PhD in 1941, Schultes documented the ethnobotany of the tribal peoples of the northwest Amazon

• When he returned to Bogota from the Amazon Basin, he learned that WWII had begun

• Went to the American embassy to go home, but they sent him back into the Amazon

• Schultes was assigned to determine the density of rubber trees in the Amazon and to see if the local tribal people could harvest the rubber

• Spent 14 years traveling through the NW Amazon

Richard Evans Schultes

Claude Levi-Strauss – Father of structural anthropology

Three common components of all indigenous healing systems

• a cosmological view of the universe that informs the cause, diagnosis, and treatment of disease

• a cultural context in which healthcare is given• a standard collection of pharmaceutical

substances

components of successful ethnopharmacological research…

• knowledge of culture’s self-identity, world view (borrows from structural anthropology)

• knowledge of culture’s concept of disease cause / etiology

• knowledge of culture’s names for diseases• knowledge of culture’s plant taxonomy (may

or may not correspond to Western concepts)

ethical ethnopharmacological practice

• indigenous property rights• appropriate compensation• conservation of resources (cultural and

biological)• return of knowledge?

“Grey Pharmaceuticals”

• Many safe and effective drugs are not marketable in Western pharmaceutical industry– no more safe or effective than an existing

treatment– drug affects more than one point in a biochemical

pathway

Ethnobotanical Research and Medicine in Developing Countries

• In Western medicine, only pure compounds of known molecular structure and pharmacological activity are acceptable drug candidates

• Developing drugs that conform to these standards is expensive and these drugs are typically inaccessible to people in developing countries

• Crude plant extracts that are proven to be clinically safe and effective offer a sustainable and low cost alternative to Western drugs in the developing world

Ethnobotanical Research and Medicine in Developing Countries

• many countries, including Mexico, China, Nigeria, and Thailand, are integrating traditional botanical medicine into their primary health care systems

• According to the World Health Organization, more than 3.5 billion people in the developing world rely on plants as components of their healthcare

Ethnobotanical Research and Medicine in Developing Countries

• rapid urbanization / Westernization often accompanied by the loss of traditional medical knowledge

• ethnobotanical research plays an important role in documenting and preserving traditional knowledge for transfer into primary health care system

Preserving resources

• cultural (language, customs, myths, values & world view)

• ethnobotanical knowledge• biological (biodiversity, accessibility)