Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice An Ethnobotanist Searches for New
Medicines in the Rain Forest 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