For thousands of years, healers have used plants to cure illness.
Aspirin, the world's most widely used drug, is based on compounds
originally extracted from the bark of a willow tree, and more than a
quarter of medicines found on pharmacy shelves contain plant compounds.
Now Western medicine, faced with health crises such as AIDS, Alzheimer's
disease, and cancer, has begun to look to the healing plants used by
indigenous peoples to develop powerful new medicines. Nowhere is the
search more promising than in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical
forest, home to a quarter of all botanical species on this planet - as
well as hundreds of Indian tribes whose medicinal plants have never been
studied by Western scientists. In Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice,
ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin recounts his travels and studies with some
of the most powerful Amazonian shamans, who taught him the plant lore
their tribes have spent thousands of years gleaning from the rain
forest. For more than a decade, Dr. Plotkin has raced against time to
harvest and record new plants before the rain forests' fragile
ecosystems succumb to overdevelopment - and before the Indians abandon
their own culture and learning for the seductive appeal of Western
material culture. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice relates nine of the
author's quests, taking the reader along on a wild odyssey as he
participates in healing rituals; discovers the secret of curare, the
lethal arrow poison that kills in minutes; tries the hallucinogenic
snuff epena that enables the Indians to speak with their spirit world;
and earns the respect and fellowship of the mysterious shamans as he
proves that he shares both their endurance and theirreverence for the
rain forest. Mark Plotkin combines the Darwinian spirit of the great
writer-explorers of the nineteenth century - curious, discursive, and
rigorously scientific - with a very modern concern for the erosion of
our environment and the vanishing culture of native peoples.
