Looking within: urban ethnomedicine and ethnobotany.

D on Jose,” an experienced traditional healer in his 60s, concentrated his gaze on his middle-aged p atient, looking carefully into her eyes as she re c i ted her symptoms. “I am fatigued, frequently with pain in my abdomen, and have a feeling of fullness. My periods are so heavy—I notice that I pass huge clots of blood which look dark and deep red,” she noted. He reached tow a rd her and held her hand, feeling her pulse, and asked questions about her life, her symptoms, and her state of mind. My (M. B.’s) re s e a rc h assistant noted every word, faithfully re c o rding the ancient pra ctices of this wise elder as I photographed the encounter. G athering data on the traditional healing practices of elders f rom many cultures has been the focus of my fieldwork as an ethn obotanist for nearly 3 decades. This work has allowed me to visit some of the most biodiverse and culturally fascinating corners of the planet. Sometimes it takes us a week to reach the study site, t raveling by canoe, World War II vintage airplane, helicopter, or c o m m e rcial airline, even cutting through the forest trails made by our field guides and teachers. To d ay, how e v e r, I have come to my field site via subway — t h e D Train—and the most complicated part of the journey has been getting the turnstile to read the Metro card as I attempt to swipe it again and again. Fi n a l l y, success, and the gate opens! This trip, made to the Dominican community of Washington Heights, takes a fraction of the time that would be needed to travel to the Caribbean, yet the ethnomedical data it yields are just as rich. The p roject is on urban ethnomedicine and ethnob o t a n y, a collaborative venture with Fredi Kronenberg, P h D, of the Rosenthal Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University; Adriane Fu g h Berman, M D, D e p a rtment of Health Care Sciences, George Washington University School of Medicine; Bonnie O’Connor, P h D, Division of Pe d i atric Ambulat o ry Medicine, Rhode Is l a n d Ho s p i t a l / B rown University Medical School; and a group from The New Yo rk Botanical Gard e n . The goal is to learn about the medicinal plants used by healers of various cultural and ethnic groups in New Yo rk City that are prescribed by traditional healers for women’s health conditions. Patients with uterine fibroids, hot flashes, menorrhagia, or e n dometriosis have visited traditional healers in various parts of the city, who then offered advice on how to tre at these conditions. Re s e a rch assistants from the complementary and alternative medicine center ob s e rved this interaction, under the specific terms of the study design. For example, the patients were not allowed to take the remedies suggested by the healers—the study was designed only to document the initial prescriptions and is not a clinical tra i l . Because each patient visited a selection of the healers part i c i p at i n g in this study, it would be ill advised for a patient to ingest so many individual plants or mixtures over the course of their interv i ew s . One major goal of the study is to develop a list of the plant species recommended for these 4 conditions, and the study of Latino healers has resulted in a list of 67 species of plants, prescribed mainly for fibroids, followed by menorrhagia. The initial results of this re s e a rch were re p o rted in a recent issue of Economic Botany, and a series of papers on other aspects of the project will appear over the next few years. The most frequently p rescribed plants for this group of conditions included beets, a g ave, sugar, kalanchoe, chamomile, and a cucumber re l at i v e known as batata de burro. Other lesser-known species were prescribed, including those that might be found in a Caribbean forest, such as Genipa americana, a relative of the coffee plant, and Guazuma ulmifolia, in the same family as the chocolate plant. We recently spoke with Fredi Kronenberg, who commented on the value of this type of work (oral communication, May 2001):