Treatment
Once the cause of ill-health has been established (by divination if necessary),
its treatment may comprise only herbal remedies or may call for additional
measures, e.g. behavioural adjustment, cleansing or appropriate ritual
procedures.^13 In this way, the physical, mental and spiritual needs of the
patient are all met, and health (defined by the WHO as a complete state of
physical and mental well-being, rather than the mere absence of disease or
infirmity) is achieved.
The use of indigenous plants
History
Despite a lack of formal recognition, the potential of TM as a source of
useful therapeutic agents was not entirely overlooked by early colonial
governors, physicians, botanists and missionaries working in Africa. In
South Africa, one of the first African states to come under colonial rule
(1652), frequent comments are to be found in the literature of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries concerning the medical application of
locally available plant species.
An early account (1785) of the traditional uses of 28 African plants,
entitled De Medicina Africanorum,^14 was made by the Swedish botanist and
physician Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828), a student of Linnaeus. Thun-
berg had been granted permission by the Dutch East India Company (VOC)
to spend some time (1772–4) at the Cape, which served at the time as a
VOC supply station. Botany and medicine being closely allied professions at
that time, Thunberg was keenly interested in the medicinal uses of the plants
that he encountered at the Cape and clearly saw a role for them in health-
care. The VOC itself, soon after its establishment in 1602, had encouraged
its governors in Africa, India and the East to undertake ethnomedical
research with a view to providing effective healthcare to the staff employed
at its various stations.^15 This was a matter of necessity, because the herbal
medicines despatched from the VOC apothecary shop in Amsterdam deteri-
orated rapidly during long sea voyages and were often ineffective against
tropical diseases. As Smith^9 noted ‘In the field of medicinal remedies, far
from the original centres where the standard remedies grew, the colonists
turned to the lore of the natives and adapted the native medicines to their
own pharmacopoeias’.
The most comprehensive account to date of the traditional medicines of
Africa was published in 1932, followed by a second edition in 1962.^16 The
authors of this work were two medical officers employed by the then South
African Chamber of Mines in Johannesburg. In the course of treating
Traditional medical practice in Africa | 89