"Every old person that dies is like a library burned down"

I've got mixed feelings about blogs - there's a nice Private Eye cartoon of someone "updating his blog" and can be seen at his screen typing "me, me, me, me, me" but even though it's a bit of a vanity project I thought I'd weigh in with 'what I did recently'.

As some people may know, I have a passing interest in the use of plants in medicines - more of a dilettantefascination than serious study, but an interest nonetheless.  My science background and complete lack of anthropological knowledge means that my perspective comes more perhaps from pharmacognosy (the science of biogenic or nature-derived pharmaceuticals and poisons) than ethnobotany (the speaker gave a nice definition of this too but I didn't write it down quickly enough!).

You may also know that I love going to hear talks and events and have signed up to numerous mailing lists to feed my addiction so I was pretty pleased to find out that the Society of Apothecaries was having its annual Sir Hans Sloane 'eponymous' lecture on these closely-linked topics.

"The barge to curing - interdisciplinary links between pharmacognosy, medical ethnobotany and the history of medicines" was delivered by Prof. Michael Heinrich on Monday 4 June 2007 at the Chelsea Physic Garden and I was lucky enough to be able to attend - it was fascinating.

While wandering around the gardens beforehand I was chuffed to spot an acanthus plant as I'd never seen one before in the flesh and they make an appearance in lots of lovely art from William Morris (how's that for a nice
bit of camouflaged wallpaper!)

The lecture format was a little unusual in that proceedings began with be-robed apothecaries filing to the front to bow at each other - I thought we might be about to toast the Queen at one point.

Prof. Heinrich works in the Centre for Pharmacognosy and Phytotherapy at the School of Pharmacy and did his PhD in Mexican plants and some of his own PhD students are continuing in that and other areas.

Showing pictures from the Natural History Museum's herbarium specimens, he mentioned xocolatl (chocolate) and acuacatl (aguacatle or avocado) and commented on the great variety of cultivars of these and other plants and how many might have been lost.

Apparently before the new world was conquered there were no products available in the West containing caffeine and we have Hans Sloane to thank for this novelty - he made chocolate more palatable by mixing it with milk and sold it as a medicinal product.

He mentioned that finding out more about the several thousand medicinally used plants is a meticulous job and that we've much to learn from the historical sciences.

A recent project worked with Ch'orti people (I might have spelled that a bit wrong) who are from Guatemala. Some speak Spanish, others their own language and people were interviewed with the aid of interpreters. The people were happy to talk to his researchers about their experience of using plants as some of them felt that their children and grandchildren weren't so interested. He quoted the phrase above but I don't know where it came from.  His researchers are documenting plant knowledge for the future, and not just future Western ethnobotanists. Information that had been documented in the nineteenth century is now being rediscovered by N. American indigenous groups who are able to return to their library of information. However as there is a loss of languages there is a loss of information.

He didn't shy away from the slightly more controversial issue of "just because people have been using a plant for hundreds of years doesn't mean it's safe" pointing out that a particular plant is used for gastrointestinal (GI) problems but further down the line (5-7 years later) its latent toxicity can cause kidney cancer - a fact that hadn't necessarily been picked up until epidemiological studies were done. Apparently some fellow called Charles Wisdom (in the 1930s) collected information on the plants and plant parts most frequently recorded for GI problems but he didn't go much in for collecting voucher specimens.

Next episode - Popoluca Vera Cruz