Disturbance Pharmacopoeias: Medicine and Myth from the Humid Tropics

Abstract

The much‐publicized quest for miracle drug plants in tropical rainforests has provided compelling support for the preservationist agenda. This article questions the assumptions that underpin this claim, particularly the myth that pristine forest represents the primary repository of nature's medicinal providence. After tracing colonial European efforts at medicinal plant discovery, intellectual property exploitation, and plant transference and acclimation, I review the recent resurgence of scientific interest in tropical folk pharmacopoeias. In spite of the image marketed by environmental entrepreneurs, the medicinal foraging preference of rural tropical groups is largely successional mosaics of their own creation—trails, kitchen gardens, swiddens, and forest fallows. Focusing on the subsistence transition from hunting and gathering to small‐scale cultivation, I propose that disturbance pharmacopoeias are the logical outcome of changing subsistence strategies, ecological processes, and disease patterns. Salient, familiar, accessible, and rich in bioactive compounds, anthropogenic nature represents the ideal tropical medicine chest. Whereas bioprospecting enterprises carried out during the colonial period and at present employ similar rhetoric—deadly disease, miracle cures, and fantastic profits—these endeavors were in the past and continue to be buttressed by fictitious notions of virgin tropical nature and the mysterious healing powers of its “primitives.”Key Words: pharmacopoeia, tropical rainforest, ethnobotany, medicinal plants, human ecology.