When William Sargent’s first edition of “Crab Wars” was published in 2006, few outside the biomedical community knew of the value of their unusual blood to the research and development of a range of pharmaceuticals. Now, following a number of popular articles about the subject, far more people are aware of it, but just how up-to-date they be in their understanding is unclear. Thus, a second, fully updated edition of the book is a most welcome development indeed.
It’s the age-old balance – pain and pleasure, sorrow and happiness, death and life; so many of the things of the world which bring about one are inextricably linked to the other, and even sometimes one and the same. For millennia, folk healers and herbalists, whose spheres of activity have developed, expanded, and diversified into those of physicians and pharmacists, while also still existing in modernized forms of traditional practice, as well as fields of more academic study such as ethnobotany, have sought for treatments and cures in the world of plants. And, in reference to the aforementioned balance, some of the plants so used, when prepared or employed differently, hold the power to take as well as preserve life.
Kara Rogers‘ new book Out of Nature; Why Drugs from Plants Matter to the Future of Humanity instantly went to the top of my “to read” short list the moment I finished reading the press release about it from the University of Arizona Press. After all, the combination of botany and ecology with the all-too-pressing but seldom […]